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FOOTPRINTS OF THE SAVIOUR. 



Footprints of the Saviour. 

2DetootionaI Jftutiieg 

in 

€|je Eife an* Mature of our Eotfi* 



BY THE 



REV. JULIAN K. SMYTH. 
ii 




How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of Him that bringeth good 
tidings, that proclaimeth peace ; that bringeth good tidings of good ; that pro- 
claimed salvation ; that saith unto Zion, Thy God reigneth 1 — ISAIAH lii. 7. 



BOSTON: 

ROBERTS BROTHERS. 

1886. 




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Copyright, i88b, 
By Roberts Brothers. 




5Sntber0ttg $«$$»: 
John Wilson and Son, Cambridge. 



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7" ORD, my first fruits present themselves to Thee ; 
Yet not mine neither: for from Thee they came. 
And must return. Accept of them and me, 
And make us strive, who shall sing best Thy name. 
Tumi their eyes hither, who shall 7nake a gain : 
Theirs, who shall hurt themselves or me, refrain. 

Herbert. 



PREFACE. 



This little volume aims to make real to 
thought and affection the Divine Humanity of 
the Lord Jesus Christ. It does not attempt a 
complete narration of the events in our Saviour's 
life, neither does it seek to enter the forum of 
critical discussion. Its purpose is, rather, to 
present the Lord's Humanity in its saving rela- 
tions to men ; to show how real that Humanity 
was, and how real it still is to all who are striv- 
ing to understand their Saviour, and come within 
the peaceful shadow of His Being. For unless 
all signs fail, many are longing to understand the 
unity of God in Christ; and the tempted and 
the penitent, the weary and the heavy-laden, 
would fain cast themselves upon His blessed 
Personality, and find rest unto their souls. 



viii PREFACE. 



The chapters which follow are written from a 
religious point of view which, it is believed, 
makes plain the divinely human nature of the 
Lord, to the end that faith may look to Him 
with cleared vision, and that love may cling to 
Him in humbleness of heart. For to how many 
a would-be disciple could Christ say, as He once 
said to Philip : " Have I been so long time with 
you, and yet hast thou not known Me ? " 



Boston, October, 1886. 



CONTENTS. 



PAGE 

The Footprints 11 

I. The Christ-Child 29 

II. The Carpenter of Nazareth .... 45 

III. The Christ 63 

IY. The Sympathy op Christ 83 

Y. The Temptations op Christ .... 105 

YI. The Sanctity of Christ 131 

YII. The Majesty op Christ 157 

YIII. The Sacrifice op Christ 179 

IX. The Eternal Presence op Christ . . 199 

Notes 229 



THE FOOTPEINTS. 



And He hath said, How beautiful the feet ! 
The feet so weary, travel-stained, and worn, — 
The feet that humbly, patiently have borne 
The toilsome way, the pressure and the heat. 

With weary human feet, He, day by day, 
Once trod this earth to work His acts of love ; 
And every step is chronicled above 
His servants take to follow in His way. 

L. G. Stock. 



€J)e footprint^. 

" I will make the place of My feet glorious. 99 

TT can never be forgotten that it was by the 
feet that the company of women held our Lord 
and worshipped Him on the great day of Resur- 
rection. ft All Hail ! " He said to them as 
they hurried to tell the disciples of the empty sep- 
ulchre. " And they came and held Him by the 
feet and worshipped Him.-" 

And they were not the first to bow there. 
Simon Peter had knelt there when the divinity 
of his Lord came upon him with such overwhelm- 
ing power that he could only cry_, "Depart from 
me, for I am a sinful man, Lord." Jairus, 
ruler though he was, came and fell at His feet ; 
for his little daughter was dying, and he needed 
help and comfort. Many a time the people 
brought those that were lame, blind, dumb, 



14 FOOTPRINTS OF THE SAVIOUR. 

maimed, and many other afflicted ones, and, in the 
language of one of the Gospels, " cast them down 
at Jesus' feet ; and He healed them." The Syro- 
phenician woman, with spirit so humble that she 
was content to be likened unto one of the dogs 
which eat of the children's crumbs, came and fell 
at His feet and begged for the healing of her 
daughter. When the devil-legion had been cast 
out of the man of Gadara, the people hurried out 
of the city to see him ; and they found him " sit- 
ting at the feet of Jesus, clothed and in his right 
mind/' More touching still must have been the 
sight of the penitent woman in the Pharisee's 
house. A woman of shame she was, yet stole to 
where the Saviour was reclining ; and though the 
Pharisee had nothing but scornful looks and cut- 
ting words, she kissed and anointed the feet of 
Him who came to call sinners to repentance. At 
those feet pious Mary sat, listening to His words 
with such rapt attention that she forgot her 
sister, fretted with " much serving." 

One simple but impressive fact comes to us 
from these and similar incidents, — the Lord re- 



AT THE FEET OF THE 31 ASTER. 15 

ceived and accepted men's reverence. True, very 
many utterly rejected Him. Many thought of 
Him only as a good man. But we cannot forget 
that there were some — no matter how few — who 
felt that He was more than a good man or a 
prophet even. There were some who felt that 
their place was at His feet. And yet to all out- 
ward appearances the Lord was there as one of 
them. He told them, indeed, who He was ; but 
it must have puzzled them sometimes to see Him 
living on their plane and amid their conditions. 

Now, if He had come with signs of super- 
natural glory; if He had appeared only to their 
spiritual sight, as John once saw Him, His eyes 
as flames of fire, His face shining as the sun, 
His feet like unto polished brass ; or as the three 
apostles saw Him at the transfiguration, a figure 
of dazzling brightness, — if the Lord had come 
in any such way, we should never have thought 
to ask why people knelt to Him. 

But He did not come in this way. The Hu- 
manity He assumed grew up in plain sight of all. 
He lived for thirty years in the little village of 



16 FOOTPRINTS OF THE SAVIOUR. 

Nazareth. At length He goes forth. He bids 
men follow Him, not as a reformer, or a new 
philosopher, but as the Christ, the " Anointed," 
the Word incarnate. He performs miracles. He 
teaches with an authority that belongs to no man. 
He forgives sins. He stills the tempests. He 
raises the dead. And yet outwardly He lives a 
human life, subject to fatigue, hunger, pain, 
death. He places Himself, on one occasion, in 
the attitude of a servant, bending over the feet 
of His twelve apostles, — not excepting the man 
who lifted up his heel against Him. He says 
to them, "I am among you as one that serveth." 
But still a certain something, which was not of 
earth, nor of man, flowed out from that Humanity 
and brought men to their knees. In short, they 
knelt to His Humanity as divine. 

And this is a point of vast significance. We 
read the accounts of our Saviour's life. In our 
thoughts, we see Him as once He was seen by 
the organs of natural vision. Many things, of 
course, we do not see, — the look of His face, 
His dress, His deeds of miracle and love. But, 



DEUS-HOMO. 17 



speaking generally, we see Him in this wonderful 
presentation of Himself in His Humanity. And 
what do we see? One who was tempted and 
afflicted ; One who mingled with the household 
life of fishermen and peasants ; One who fasted 
and prayed, toiled and was crucified, yet presented 
Himself as divine. 

Here is where many grow puzzled. This 
rock, the Divine Humanity of the Lord Jesus, 
divides their thought into two courses. They 
can think of Him with affection as one who was 
purely human. They are keenly sensitive to all 
that was beautiful, self-sacrificing, gentle, devoted 
in the life of His Humanity; always insisting, 
however, that to such a conception it is not only 
unnecessary, but positively confusing, to inject the 
quality of divinity. Perfect man, but not God- 
man. 

And so, it is easy to see, the thought of God 
grows correspondingly more impersonal. God is 
thought of not so much as a person as an infi- 
nite power and essence, — an all-pervading some- 
thing, penetrating and surrounding the natural 
2 



18 FOOTPRINTS OF THE SAVIOUR. 

universe; a supreme Order and Wisdom and 
Love, too infinite and far-reaching, it is claimed, 
to be centred in any being. 

Thus, the stream once divided, its two courses 
flow wider and wider apart, — one towards man, 
towards the merely human; the other towards 
God, conceived of as infinite, divine, impersonal 
essence. 

Let us look back, for a moment, to the Gos- 
pels. Did those who really believed in the Lord 
think of Him merely as man made perfect ? The 
apostles were not theologians; and it was too 
early in the history of the Church to formulate 
an exact doctrine of the Son of Man. But it 
seems certain that the Lord encouraged them to 
believe that in some way within His Humanity 
dwelt the very divine Fatherhood ; for He asked 
Philip, with a touch of disappointment, it would 
seem, as though it pained Him that he should 
have to be asked, " Believest thou not that I am 
in the Father, and the Father in Me ? " 

It is said in the Gospel of John, — and we 
hold to it strictly, — " No man hath seen God 



TRANSCENDENT GLORIES. 19 

at any time; the only begotten Son, which is in 
the bosom of the Father, He hath declared [that 
is, revealed] Him." Who can think of Divinity 
as it is in itself ? Who can comprehend Infinity, 
— infinite love, infinite wisdom, infinite power? 
Can any one? Is it not just this effort to try to 
calculate these infinite powers and qualities, and 
get some exact idea of them, that has baffled 
and wearied many a brain, and made the exist- 
ence of God seem such a hopeless tiling for our 
little intellects to grasp? 

We throw ourselves upon these immense truths 
of religion. God is infinite. His love knows no 
bounds. His wisdom is unsearchable. His power 
is exhaustless, — " For the Eternal One fainteth 
not, neither is weary." But w r ho can understand 
such things ? Our love gets so easily ruffled ; 
our wisdom becomes so easily clouded ; our power 
is so easily broken ! Must God, then, remain as 
this vast, incomprehensible Being, whose very in- 
finity oppresses us ? Can there be no accommo- 
dation of Him to our finite perceptions? Can 
He not bring Himself down in some way, and 



20 FOOTPRINTS OF THE SAVIOUR. 

show us something of that love and wisdom and 
power which, after all, we do rely on and wish to 
know more of ? God in His own eternal bright- 
ness would blast our sight. But is there no veil 
upon which we can look without fear, and through 
which we can see His face? "No man hath 
seen God at any time," — that truth we know. 
But the other : " The only begotten Son, which 
is in the bosom of the Father, He hath revealed 
Him."" Revealed Him how, — by telling us 
more about Him? But we cannot understand 
infinity. Let the astronomer tell us all he knows 
about the sun ; we cannot look at it in its mid- 
day splendor : it only blinds our vision. We are 
finite, and always shall be. God is infinite, and 
always will be. And the point is not, educate 
the finite until it can grasp the Infinite ; but let 
the Infinite reveal Himself in some form that is 
familiar to us, and which we can understand. 

And that, the Gospels say, has been done through 
the Humanity of the Lord Jesus Christ. And 
what is necessary in order that that manifestation 
shall be a true and perfect one ? Must not the 



THE INFINITE REVEALED. 21 

Humanity live from the Divinity, as the body lives 
from the soul ? For how could any man, be he 
never so blameless, reveal in his own life the Infi- 
nite, which would be as hopelessly above his com- 
prehension as above ours ? Is it that once in the 
world's history there came a man pure and stain- 
less, whose every act and every word were such 
perfect reflections of the divine love and wisdom 
that the world, as by one accord, could turn and 
say, "There, this perfect man has revealed God 
to us"? 

This, at least, is not what Jesus said. His 
claim was not that His Humanity was flashing 
back the divine brightness as from a mirror. 
The claim was a very different one. What was 
it ? " The words that I speak unto you, I speak 
'not of Myself; but the Father that dwelleth in 
Me, He doeth the works." In other words, the 
Divine is manifesting itself through the Human, 
not upon it. It is revealing itself from within. 

And this is the only perfect revelation possible. 
The Human must be in such relations with the 
Divine that the Divine can be its life and soul, 



22 FOOTPRINTS OF THE SAVIOUR. 

and not merely beam upon it. And because such 
a relation did exist, everything the Saviour said, 
everything the Saviour did, revealed the very 
Divine itself which we wish to know. The divine 
feelings of love were expressed in the love which 
Jesus showed for the world's salvation. He 
pitied men when He saw them in pain or trouble ; 
He was kind, surely, to the unthankful and the 
evil; He was forgiving to His enemies, and 
prayed for those who despitefully used Him and 
persecuted Him. How quietly He labored in 
Nazareth ! How gently He met opposition when 
He began to teach ! How tenderly He dealt with 
sinners ! How wisely He educated those who 
believed in Him, lifting them gradually upon 
higher planes of life ! And now, think of all 
this as the revelation of God ; think of it as the 
divine love and wisdom acting and speaking in 
a human way ; think of the Humanity as God's 
Humanity, and how plain and beautiful it all 
becomes ! 

Do any ask of the divine love? Let them 
learn of it in the Saviour's love, as He kneels at 



"Z6>, THIS IS our gob: 3 23 

the grave of Lazarus ; as He weeps over Jeru- 
salem ; as He blesses the little children ; as He 
heals the sick or comforts the sorrowful ; as He 
soothes the dying malefactor on the cross. Would 
we know of the divine forgiveness? It is here 
in this one sweet sentence of mercy : " Neither 
do I condemn thee; go and sin no more." 
Would we know of the divine activity? It is 
all revealed in the sleepless nights of preparation, 
spent alone on the mountains in prayer ; the days 
devoted to teaching and healing; the tireless 
errands of mercy from village to village. Would 
we know of the divine patience and endurance ? 
We have but to watch the calm, quiet way in 
which He meets His betrayer and the company 
that take Him; the false accusations, to which 
He listens in silence; the ridicule, the taunts, 
the blows dealt by savage hands, the coward- 
ice of Pilate, the scourge, the thorn-crown, the 
cross. 

And so, we ask at last, would any know 
God the Infinite? We point to His Humanity 
and say : " He who invited the weary and the 



24 FOOTPRINTS OF THE SAVIOUR. 

heavy-laden to His breast; He whom even the 
winds and the seas obeyed; He who declared 
Himself ' the Way, the Truth, and the Life ; ' He 
whose spirit has inspired, comforted, ay, saved 
the struggling souls of men, — He, surely, is God- 
manifest.'" 

" And it shall be said in that day, Lo, this 
is our God; we have waited for Him and He 
will save us : this is the Lord ; we have waited 
for Him; we will be glad and rejoice in His 
salvation." 

Well may we rejoice. To know God, do we 
only have to come to Him in His Humanity ? 
Can we study Him, the things He did, the words 
He said, all breathing snch mercy, all bound up 
so exquisitely with human cares and sorrows that 
it seems as if humanity must cling to Him ; can 
we go like the disciples and see where He dwelt, 
study as it were His footprints, — the contact of 
His life with earth and humanity, — follow Him 
from day to day, up the hills and down the val- 
leys, through the fields and over the seas, until 
He becomes endeared to us as a person, and know 



THE FEET BEAUTIFUL. 25 

that it is God in His Humanity we are following 
and beginning to love ? 

Then we may well say in the words of old, 
" How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet 
of Him that bringeth good tidings, that proclaim- 
eth peace; that bringeth good tidings of good, 
that proclaimeth salvation ; that saith to Zion, 
thy God reigneth." The Lord was the bringer 
of good tidings, and He came proclaiming peace 
and salvation. His feet stood upon the Mount 
of Olives, as was promised, ilnd they were 
beautiful indeed ! — coming down the mountains of 
love ; coming down and walking far into the val- 
leys below, where man was toiling and suffering, 
a slave to sin. But the Prince of Peace came 
proclaiming salvation ; and His feet touched the 
earth where men were dwelling ; and His enemies 
pierced His feet ; but the print of them is not 
gone, for He had said in prophecy, " I will make 
the place of My feet glorious." 

The traveller goes to those Eastern lands where 
the scenes of the Gospels are laid. The land is 
for the most part waste, and towns are but little 



26 FOOTPRINTS OF THE SAVIOUR. 

more than ruins. Yet lie goes from place to 
place ; goes to Nazareth and to Bethlehem village ; 
goes to " the little blue sea of Galilee/'' where the 
fishermen were washing and mending their nets ; 
goes to Jerusalem and sees the Mount of Olives, 
whither the Lord frequently withdrew for the 
night, and at its foot the garden of Gethsemane, 
with the old olive-trees. And the thought 
during his pilgrimage is, that he is in the land 
which the Saviour trod, and among the moun- 
tains down whose slopes His feet walked when 
He came proclaiming peace and salvation. 

But there are other fields which bear His foot- 
prints, — the fields of our human life. These re- 
main much as they were then. There are essen- 
tially the same cares, the same temptations and 
sins, the same doubts and fears, griefs and suffer- 
ings, the same self-love. And God walked amid 
these fields. His feet are His Humanity ; and the 
print of those feet, the impressions left upon hu- 
man life, can never disappear. " I will make the 
place of My feet glorious," are the words of Him 
who is Faithful and True. The footprints will 



STEPS OF HOLINESS. 27 

become plainer and brighter; and we shall try 
to walk in them. For, in the words of the apos- 
tle John, " He that saith he abideth in Him 
ought himself also so to walk, even as He 
walked." Then, indeed, would the promise come 
true, — " Yea, the Lord shall give that which is 
good, and our land shall yield her increase. Bight- 
eousness shall go before Him, and shall set us in 
the way of His steps." 



THE CHRIST-CHILD. 



Oh, my Child-God, most gentle King, 
To me Thy waxing glory show ; 

Wake in my heart as wakes the spring, 
Grow as the leaf and lily grow. 

Thou gav'st Thy pure example so, 
The copy in my childish breast 

Was a child's copy. I did know 
God, made in childhood manifest. 

Long -suffering Lord, to man reveaVd 
As one that e'en the child doth wait, 

Thy full salvation is my shield, 
Thy gentleness hath made me great. 

Holy Songs, Carols, and Sacred, Ballads. 



I. 

"And the Child grew, and waxed strong in spirit, 
filled with wisdom; and the grace of God was upon 
Mm." 

TT was a hard, sinful world to which the Christ- 
Child came. Silently and at night, while the 
world slept, the Child Jesus was born. And when 
the dew was lifted, there upon the face of the 
earth lay the Bread of heaven ! He came as 
peacefully as did the manna which fell upon the 
wilderness. " Manliu ?" the children of Israel 
exclaimed, as they beheld " a small, round thing, 
as small as the hoar-frost on the ground, — "■ what 
is it ? " u Manliu ? " the world has continued 
to ask ever since " the living Bread w came down 
from heaven. There lies the Bread to be gath- 
ered from day to day and be (< our daily bread." 



32 FOOTPRINTS OF THE SAVIOUR. 

" This is the Bread "which cometh down from 
heaven, that a man may eat thereof and not die." 

How simple to human sight, this Bread lying 
peacefully upon the world's wilderness ! How 
sweet and strengthening to failing souls, who have 
tasted and seen that the Lord is good, and 
know that Jesus spoke truly when He said, 
"If any man eat of this Bread, he shall live 
forever." 

But the Jews, we read, "murmured at Him 
because He said, I am the Bread which came 
down from heaven. And they said, Is not this 
Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and 
mother we know? How is it, then, that He 
saith, I came down from heaven ? " What 
would they have said had they stood by the 
manger on the day of the nativity? What 
would they have said at any time during that 
childhood? Would they not have asked, with 
added scorn, how one who was born into the 
world . apparently as other children, who grew 
in wisdom and stature as other children, could 
be this heaven-descended Bread? 



"WHO HATH BELIEVED OUR REPORT?" 33 

Even Joseph and Mary were perplexed. "When 
the shepherds of Judea came and told of " the 
flocks of God"" which swept down 

" And sang to them of peace," 

as though the heavens were trembling with joy 
and could not keep back the good tidings, 
6 ' Mary kept all these things and pondered them 
in her heart." When the devout Simeon took 
the Child in his arms, as it was brought into the 
temple, and blessed God, saying that he had at 
last seen the salvation prepared before the face 
of all people, "Joseph and Mary marvelled at 
those things which were spoken of Him." They 
could not have forgotten what angels had said 
of Him. They knew the promises of their 
Scriptures. Yet still they marvelled. 

Down into Egypt they fled, to save this young 
life from the murderous hate of Herod. They 
take Him to Nazareth; and there in that de- 
spised little town, unknown, unnoticed, it may 
be, " the Child grew and waxed strong in spirit, 
filled with wisdom, and the grace of God was 
upon Him." 



34 FOOTPRINTS OF THE SAVIOUR. 

At length, the time came when, according to 
Jewish custom, He must go up to the Passover 
at Jerusalem. Up to the age of twelve, Hebrew 
parents were regarded as responsible for a boy's 
conduct, and they had absolute control of his 
ritual performances. But after twelve, they were 
required to present him to the Lord. The boy 
was inducted as member into the community 
amid solemn and impressive ceremonies. He 
then became what was known as a " son of the 
Law." x So we read of our Lord, " And when He 
was twelve years old, they went up to Jerusalem, 
after the custom of the feast." 

It is pleasant to think of this first Passover 
as agreeing quite closely with our first Com- 
munion, and of the induction as a son of the 
Law as similar to our rite of Confirmation. 2 
It is pleasant to think that the Lord has gone 
before us in this way; that there was for Him 
a first Passover, and an entrance upon the re- 
ligious responsibilities and duties of youth. 

The week of the feast is ended, and the many 

1 See Note A. 2 See Note B. 



THE FIRST PASSOVER. 35 

thousand pilgrims set out for their homes. At the 
end of a day's journey Mary and Joseph discover 
that the Christ-Child is not in their company,, as 
they had supposed. Three days they search for 
Him, and then they find Him in one of the schools 
of the rabbis, held in the temple courts, with the 
doctors and, most likely, their pupils gathered 
around Him. The Scripture is that day being 
fulfilled, which says, " I have more understanding 
than all my teachers ; for Thy testimonies are 
my meditation. I understand more than the 
ancients; because I keep Thy precepts.-" 

For Mary and Joseph, the mystery of this 
young life is deepening. A son, yet not a son. 
Dutiful, it would seem; gentle, submissive; He 
is with them but not of them. How plainly this 
is brought out in His answer to Mary. She 
appeals to Him half reproachfully, " Thy father 
and I have sought Thee sorrowing." There is 
parental authority in the appeal. " Thy father 
and I/' — Joseph and Mary. And how does 
He answer? A few words gently reminding the 
woman of a divine Fatherhood she should not 



36 FOOTPRINTS OF THE SAVIOUR. 

have forgotten — " Wist ye not that I must be 
about My Father's business?" 

It surely is a most expressive figure, this lad 
from Nazareth, standing there amid the teachers 
of the Law, breaking away from the past, look- 
ing into vistas of truth which were opening upon 
His clearing vision; and then the woman and 
the man clinging to Him as their own. "My 
Father's business." He will go back to Galilee ; 
He will toil as one of them ; He will be known 
simply as " the carpenter ; " but whether in 
Nazareth or in Jerusalem, whether in the house 
of Joseph and Mary or in the temple, whether 
in the carpenter's shop or in the school of the 
rabbis, a divine mission, a divine connection with 
an indwelling Father is growing and growing, 
bringing Humanity and Divinity into relations 
which can best be described as those of Father 
and Son. 

Many keep coming back to this figure with no 
slight perplexity. Later on when we see Him in 
the full exercise of His wisdom ; later on when we 
see Him healing, blessing, forgiving, touching 



DIVINITY AND CHILDHOOD. 37 

with saving power the sinking spirits of men, we 
seem to come more fully into the meaning of His 
life. When the time comes that He can declare 
Himself the very light and life of the world ; 
when He can invite the disconsolate to His 
breast ; yea, when He can spread His arms upon 
the cross in one last act of self-sacrifice, we can 
more easily enter into the truth of His decla- 
ration, " I am in the Father, and the Father 
in Me." We can see and feel how perfect 
the love is ; how transcendent the wisdom is ; 
how saving the power is ; and seeing and feeling 
these things, make Him the supreme object of 
our faith. 

But back there is the Child of Nazareth, grow- 
ing and waxing strong in spirit much like other 
children. There is the lad come up to His first 
Passover, drawn, it would seem, both ways, — 
looking way beyond the things of earth, far above 
the temple, or the great city, or the rabbis, at the 
very moment that Joseph and Mary are claiming 
Him as their own. 

Do we express what in some minds is a diffi- 



38 FOOTPRINTS OF THE SAVIOUR. 

culty ? Can anything be said which will explain 
how a human nature, conceived and born like the 
Son of Man, could go through the stages of 
physical and mental growth as we do, and yet be 
in personal connection with the Divine ? If this 
be explained, is not everything of that most won- 
derful, and at the same time most comforting of 
all truths, the divinely-human nature of Christ, 
explained ? 

The subject is one which, in a sense, includes 
our own natures. A child is born. Perhaps all 
one can say of it is, that it lives. It is without 
thought. It is without conscious love. And yet 
it lives. And it lives differently from a plant. 
It lives differently from an animal. There is the 
delicate, tender body, — the little dimpled hands 
beating the air, the heedless, helpless, mysterious 
thing we call the baby. But within and above 
this outward, physical nature, there is an inter- 
nal form, or principle, through which the divine 
life descends. By virtue of this principle, man 
is man and not brute, and capable of spiritual 
development. Being created, it is finite; and 



THE MIRACLE OF CHILDHOOD. 39 

although it serves to admit the divine life, still it 
can only do so in a finite degree. 

The child, however, is all unconscious of its 
inner soul-life. That can only come later. And 
it can only come at all, through the growth and 
development of the rational faculty, which is the 
great mediator between the soul and the body. 
We say " growth," because, as we know, a child 
is not born rational, but only with the faculty to 
become so. 

And how does it become rational ? Watch 
the development of a child, and we shall see how 
simple and beautiful the process is. By means 
of the senses, especially sight and hearing, the 
child comes into gradual possession of facts or 
knowledges. These knowledges keep increas- 
ing with every day. They become more vari- 
ous. And the point to be noted is, that they 
become the recipient vessels for the divine life, 
and for the introduction of higher forms of 
knowledge. 

Take a simple illustration. We wish to teach 
a child about God. Suppose we should just say, 



40 FOOTPRINTS OF THE SAVIOUR. 

"There is a God." What would that convey 
to him ? Nothing, — absolutely nothing. We 
are trying to give him a naked spiritual fact, 
and he cannot understand it. Or suppose we 
wish to tell him about the higher world, and 
should simply say, " My child, there is a heaven." 
What can that word " heaven " mean to him ? 
Nothing whatever. 

But suppose we use simple forms of thought 
in the child's mind. Suppose we begin with a 
fact he knows from his child's experience, — his 
father, — and then tell him of another Father, 
who loves and takes care of us all ; and suppose 
from what he knows of this natural world, we tell 
him about a beautiful, heavenly world, and of the 
pure and beautiful children, and the angel men 
and women there, — why, then we have done that 
wonderful thing which we cannot do to any other 
object in this universe : we have communicated a 
spiritual truth. 

These facts in a child's growth and rational de- 
velopment being recognized, we have the means of 
understanding our Lord's divinely-human nature. 



INCREASE IN WISD03L 41 

The Lord took upon Himself a human nature, 
with all the faculties for human thought and af- 
fection as a man, except in this : being conceived, 
as the Gospels declare, of the Holy Ghost, the 
internal of His Humanity was not a created form 
recipient of life, but was life. It was the Divine 
itself. And yet, can we not see that the Christ- 
Child, the nature born into the world, could have 
no consciousness of its divine soul ? There would 
be that same hiatus between the inmost and outer- 
most as with other children ; and, as with them, 
it could only be supplied by the acquisition of 
knowledges through the senses. 

We needlessly confuse ourselves if we think of 
the Babe in the manger as conscious of its Divin- 
ity ; revolving mighty thoughts in its little brain ; 
feeling the throbbings of infinite love in its child- 
heart. The time came when it had this con- 
sciousness in its fulness. But at first, the Child 
Jesus would be as another child. It would grow 
as another child, — grow, as the Gospels de- 
clare, in stature, in wisdom, and in grace. Only 
the incoming thoughts would crowd thick and 



42 FOOTPRINTS OF THE SAVIOUR. 

fast ; the flux of love would be sweet and deep. 
At twelve years He would have passed beyond 
the wisdom of the doctors of the Law. Gradu- 
ally His inner nature would be revealed to Him. 
Each knowledge learned in the great school of 
experience, every fact acquired by the senses, 
would become a vessel for the treasures of infinite 
wisdom. For it is a law of thought, that the 
spiritual must rest upon the natural, like a tem- 
ple upon its base. Silently, day by day, week by 
week, the mind of the Human would, by the suc- 
cessive development of all its degrees, become 
more and more the temple of Jehovah. There 
would be an overshadowing presence of the Di- 
vine, as of a father. A light from above would 
fill the Humanity with a certain divine radiance, 
until, in the days to come, Jesus of Nazareth 
could calmly say, " I am the Light of the 
world." 

Is it not wonderful to think of the Humanity 
of Christ accommodating itself to our condition 
even in this : that it grew in knowledge in the 
simple ways of a child ; drank in, as it were, 



"HE SHALL GROW AS THE LILY." 43 

the words of teachers, the scenes of Nature, and 
the thousand facts of human life, because in 
this way only could the Spirit of the Lord rest 
upon Him, — the spirit of wisdom and under- 
standing, the spirit of counsel and might, the 
spirit of knowledge and of the fear of the Lord, 
making Him of quick understanding in the fear 
of the Lord. 

Did the lad, looking, it may be, from that very 
hill whence, a few years later, His enemies would 
have cast Him headlong, watch "the keepers of 
vineyards pruning their vines, the shepherds lead- 
ing their flocks afield, the husbandmen sowing 
their grain, the plains over which the breezes as 
they swept made waves in the field of wheat and 
tare, the reapers at their work over the vast sur- 
faces of Esdraelon and El Battauf, the prognos- 
tics of storm coming up from the sea, or of fair 
weather when the sky at evening reddens over the 
ridges of Carmel, c the light of the world ' com- 
ing out of the east to enlighten every man," 1 — 
did He look out on all these things ? Full well we 

1 Sears's " Heart of Christ." 



FOOTPRINTS OF THE SAVIOUR. 



know that into all these scenes the divine wisdom 
flowed, and turned them into types which even 
now stand before our souls in lines of celestial 
beauty. 

Those were wonderful years in Nazareth ! 



THE CARPENTER OF NAZARETH. 



With musing long my heart doth yearn, 
The silence of His youth to learn. 

The striving that His soul would stir. 
By faith, by searchings, and by thought, 
In Eastern sheds with Him 1 3 ve wrought, 

Many good days, a carpenter. 

Holy Songs, Carols, and Sacred Ballads. 



II. 
€fje Carpenter of |jla$aretf>, 

"Is not this the carpenter's son ?" 
" Is not this the carpenter ? " 

^ | ^HE reader, if he has seen Holman Hunt's 
" Shadow of Death/' will remember that the 
picture represents the Master in the carpenter's 
shop at Nazareth. As He rests from His work, His 
position is such as to cast a shadow of the cross 
upon the background ; and upon this, the shadow 
of death, Mary, who kneels near by, Mary, into 
whose soul the sword must enter, turns her face. 
The picture is one more attempt to fill up the 
blank spaces of those thirty years in despised 
Nazareth ; to find the Messiah where the Gospels 
seem to lose Him ; to interpret religiously that 
most obscure passage in the Master's life. 



48 FOOTPRINTS OF THE SAVIOUR. 

With many there is an evident desire to behold 
God in Christ, the Divine within the Human. 
We cling to the sinlessness, perfection, the in- 
finitude of love, wisdom, and saving power, — 
this on the spiritual, divine side; and on the 
other, all those humanities and graces, the living 
and dying, which, at the end of nearly two thou- 
sand years, have still the power to smite and to 
console, to goad and to satisfy. Yet many feel 
that in speaking of the " Humanity of Jesus," or 
in showing that that Humanity fulfilled all man's 
conditions, not only in being born, but in physi- 
cal, intellectual, and spiritual growth, His divin- 
ity is compromised ; while others urge that every 
attempt to insist upon the supernatural origin and 
nature of the Redeemer is only to make His 
image less distinct, and retard His acceptance. 

How like the story of old ! Men and women 
offended, not because of the Redeemer's power 
and influence in the world; not because of the 
inspirations and consolations His name still 
brings; but offended because of this claim to 
divinity ! 



THE FIRST SERMON IN NAZARETH. 49 

The people of Nazareth, crowding into their 
little synagogue to hear this new Teacher, did 
not for a moment think of denying either His 
power or His wisdom. The hardest and narrow- 
est of them could but acknowledge that His doc- 
trines were new and searching; nor could they 
deny what their own eyes saw. Up to a certain 
point they approved of Him. Up to a certain 
point they may have been proud of Him. As He 
finishes His discourse, a low exclamation of sur- 
prise escapes from the congregation. " Whence 
hath this man this wisdom, and these mighty 
works ? " No one was there to say : This is 
not worth hearing ; these miracles are the merest 
trickery. Something in the bearing, the voice, 
but more than all, the truth uttered, must have 
impressed them too deeply for that. So all they 
could do was to question each other : " Whence 
hath this man these things ; and what wdsdom is 
this which is given unto Him, that even such 
mighty works are wrought by His hands ? " Ap- 
parently they are on the point of going over to 
Him. A moment more, the cry of " Messiah " will 
4 



50 FOOTPRINTS OF THE SAVIOUR. 

be on their lips. What hinders them ? Why, 
this question : " Is not this the carpenter ? " 
The tide has crept up to its highest mark. In a 
moment more it might have risen above that hard 
wall. Now it begins to recede. " Is not this 
the carpenter, the son of Mary, the brother of 
James and Joses, and of Juda and Simon ? 
And are not His sisters here with us ? " The en- 
thusiasm is dying out fast. No matter now what 
He might say or do, they think they know Him 
too well. " And they were offended at Him."" 
Telling words those ! They were offended at Him 
because for thirty years they had known Him as 
a carpenter in Nazareth. 

Look at the religious world to-day. Only the 
most shallow or the most conceited will deny 
beauty, wisdom, power, to this figure of the Lord 
Jesus. And after all has been said that can be 
said, after the critics have pruned the histories, 
and the cynics have sneered at our churches, and 
the unbeliever has gone over all his arguments by 
which he steels himself against spiritual faith, 
still the secret verdict of every thoughtful man 



A HYPERCRITICAL WORLD. 51 

who ever pondered the story of the Saviour 
would at least be that of Pontius Pilate, who 
found his first contempt changed into concern, - — 
« I find in Him no fault at all." No fault at all ! 
The teachings are lofty ; the Teacher is sublime. 

"Why, then, do not all men accept Him ? Be- 
cause He presents Himself as something more 
than a Teacher. Because He says, "I came 
down from heaven." "The words that I speak 
unto you I speak not of Myself; but the Father 
that dwelleth in Me, He doeth the works." The 
world delights in heroes. And if Jesus of Naza- 
reth were only a hero, a man with human ante- 
cedents, who felt the world's woes and vices so 
deeply that His soul became possessed with the 
one desire to ease it of its pains ; to interpose 
His own pure nature between man and hell ; not 
only to devote Himself, but to sacrifice Himself 
to the world's good ; cure its sicknesses, solve its 
problems, guide its morals, — if no higher claim 
were put forth for Jesus of Nazareth than this, 
then, doubtless, the world would warmly receive 
Him. But this, we maintain, is the imaginary 



52 FOOTPRINTS OF THE SAVIOUR. 

Christ. This is the unhistorical Christ. This is 
the Christ of modern days. Where do we find 
this Saviour ? Not in the Gospels ; not in the 
Epistles ; not in the writings of the Church Fa- 
thers. Place this Man-hero before the world, 
and we leave Him without a history. 

Where was He born? In Bethlehem, do we 
say ? Ah ! but the very same record declares the 
divine origin of His birth, — the Yirgin brooding 
over her motherhood; Joseph, troubled and con- 
scientious ; the shepherd folk ; the Wise Men 
from the East. If one part is history, why not 
all? If the greater part is legendary, why not 
all? Yet there stands Bethlehem to this day; 
and here are our Christian Churches. What did 
this Man-hero do ? Select some disciples ? Truly ; 
yet they called him Lord, and He said, " Ye say 
well, for so I am." What did He do ? Preach 
the Gospel ? Ay, and this was its great burden : 
" I am the Light of the world ;" "I am the 
Way, the Truth, and the Life;" " Come unto 
Me, and I will give you rest." What did He 
do ? Minister to the sick ? Nay, we cannot 



THE REAL AND THE IMAGINARY CHRIST. 53 

break off here. He cared the sick with a touch, 
with a word; He raised the dead. What did He 
say? Bead over His utterances and see how 
many of them we would put into the mouth of 
any man living or dead. Whom would we have 
say, " I am the Eesurrection and the Life ;" "I 
am the Bread of Life ; " " He that hath seen Me 
hath seen the Father ; " " all power is given unto 
Me, in heaven and in earth " ? Strike out these and 
all similar declarations, and what have we left? 
Scarcely anything. The plan disappears. The 
unity and coherence are all gone. Nothing re- 
mains but a few isolated sayings. A Teacher 
robbed of His teachings ! A Messiah with no 
solid plan of restoration ! 

Is not this a real dilemma? Christ the Sav- 
iour, honored, obeyed, not as He presented Him- 
self, but as the critics have reconstructed Him; 
not as the early Christians declare He was, — 
and they sealed their testimony with their blood, 
— but as the people of the nineteenth century 
think He might have been ! And what some 
think He might have been is simply this : The 



54 FOOTPRINTS OF THE SAVIOUR. 

Christ of the Gospels with the divine and the 
miraculous left out. And this, we hold, is 
nothing. 

Why do any insist upon this ? There are two 
reasons. First, because of a dislike to connect 
divine causes with outward effects. A universe 
creating and sustaining itself; man dependent 
upon his own human prudence and not upon 
Providence, — these are marked tendencies of our 
age. The other reason is a more worthy one ; a 
real difficulty in understanding the union of the 
Divine with the Human. We say the Lord was 
divine; and yet we read of His being born; of 
His being subject to Joseph and Mary ; of His 
dwelling thirty years in Nazareth, where He fol- 
lowed the trade of a carpenter. The religious 
mind instinctively asks : " Are such things com- 
patible with the idea of God? Could God be 
born as a man? Could God become a child? 
Would God be a carpenter?" 

Now, the Gospels reveal the Lord under what 
may appear to be two quite different, if not oppo- 
site conditions. There is Christ the child, the 



MAJESTY AND LOWLINESS. 55 

boy of twelve years, the carpenter; Christ who 
prays, toils, suffers ; Christ who grows weary and 
is tempted ; Christ who touches the depth of hu- 
man misery, and is crucified. And then there is 
the Christ triumphant, — a Being speaking with 
divine authority; looking far beyond the limits 
of time; looking into men's souls; casting out 
devils; forgiving sins; Christ the Saviour, high 
above the littlenesses of men, unhurt by their 
cruelties; "the Wonderful, the Counsellor, the 
mighty God, the Father of eternity, the Prince 
of Peace." Are these two conditions really op- 
posed to each other? 

Remembering our dual nature, the natural and 
the spiritual, the one weak, halting, circum- 
scribed, the other capable of the holiest thoughts 
and impulses, — remembering this duality in our- 
selves, do we find it so inexplicable that the Sav- 
iour should reveal two natures, one quite like a 
man's, the other infinitely above him ? 

Suppose for a moment it were possible that 
a human nature could be born in all respects a 
man except in this, — that its paternity should be 



56 FOOTPRINTS OF THE SAVIOUR. 

divine. This, it is objected, would be a miracle. 
Certainly; but a miracle only in the sense that 
it was unexpected and wonderful; a miracle per- 
fectly possible, and in harmony with all the laws 
of life, if God is the real though hidden source 
of being. 

Suppose, then, that in the Divine Providence 
this creative life should of itself cause the birth 
of a human nature. Born of a woman, it would 
inherit the tendencies and characteristics proper 
to man. It would be a nature requiring physi- 
cal, intellectual, and moral growth. It would be 
open to influences from without, that is, from the 
natural world ; and from within, that is, from the 
spiritual world. 

This human nature, then, in birth, in growth, 
in all the daily experiences for good or evil, in 
death even, would pass over the same road that 
we are passing. The difference would consist in 
this : that the soul animating that Humanity, 
being uncreated, would be divine, — the Father 
within the Son. And this would give the Hu- 
manity infinite possibilities for development. It 



THE POSSIBILITY OF A DIVINE HUMANITY, 57 

could grow infinitely in wisdom and grace. If 
it remained faithful, it could meet and overcome 
not only a few evils, as we may, but all evils. 
It could bear the assaults of the whole demoniac 
world, be tempted at every point, yet remain 
sinless. 

Outwardly He would live the life of others. 
To human eyes, the carpenter of Nazareth would 
be as others ; only more deeply thoughtful, and 
all unspotted. Inwardly, what thoughts, what 
perceptions \ The salvation of the world open- 
ing up to Him ! Deeper and deeper longings to 
live, suffer, and die for men's sakes ! 

At first, indeed, the Father within would seem 
high above the Humanity. But as that nature 
opened itself, the Divine would sweep down in 
glorifying measures. The consciousness of union 
would grow with each new experience. As with 
a man, the thoughts and feelings of heaven may 
work their way down to the very ultimates of 
his nature the more he resists evils as sins, until 
the very look on his face changes, so the 
thoughts, the love, the very heart of God would 



58 FOOTPRINTS OF THE SAVIOUR. 

gradually come into the Son of Man. The 
Divinity would become merged in the Hu- 
manity. All that had been inherited from the 
mother would day by day be put away. Then, 
toward the last, the Son would become one 
with the Father; and if any of His disciples 
should ever say, " Show us the Father/' He 
could reply, " He that hath seen Me, hath 
seen the Father." 

Enemies might seize this all but divine body 
and put it to death, but without avail. The 
work would have been done. The Lord of heaven 
would have made His way to men, would have 
lived with them, thought with them, felt with 
them. In a word, through the glorification of 
an earth-born nature, He would have made His 
Divinity human, and His Humanity divine. 

Thus would be left upon the minds of men 
an image of God-Man ; and men could look and 
pray directly to the Lord Jesus Christ as the 
ever-present Saviour, within whom dwelt the ful- 
ness of the Godhead bodily, — Father, Son, and 
Holy Spirit, one God in one Person ; God in first 



THE TRUE OBJECT OF CHRISTIAN FAITH. 59 

things and in last, in the highest and in the low- 
est, the one eternal Life-giver, the Sanctifier, the 
Comforter, whom the great company of angels 
worship and adore, crying, " "Worthy is the Lamb 
that was slain to receive power, and riches, and 
wisdom, and strength, and honor, and glory, and 
blessing." 

What has here been set forth as a supposition, 
will be maintained in what follows as a fact. The 
further we go in the study of this most wonderful 
life, the more surely shall we see traces of divinity 
and of humanity, not as qualities which are oppo- 
site and irreconcilable, but capable of the most 
perfect and absolute union. The Lord is divine, 
— supremely divine, — or else in announcing 
Himself as the Light of the world, the Bread 
of life, the Vine in which we are but branches, 
He has presumed too far upon our faith. And 
since He was divine, we have cause to marvel 
most that He could come to us in the simple, 
humble way that He did. The people of Naza- 
reth lost faith in Him, because they had known 
Him as a carpenter. As we read the story over, 



THE CHEIST. 



Nor can the vain toil cease, 

Till in the shadowy maze of life, we meet 

One who can guide our aching, wayward feet 

To find Himself — our Way, our Life and Peace. 

In Him the long unrest is soothed and stilled, 

Our hearts are filled. 

Helps by the Way. 



III. 

* 

" / am come to seek and to save that which was lost." 

T T 7E desire, in this chapter, to set clearly be- 
fore us the Saviour and His mission. His 
childhood, and the years of simple toil in Naza- 
reth, we have already considered. We have traced 
in simple outline the growth of the Humanity, 
which was assumed by incarnation, and shown its 
relation to the Divinity from which it was living, 
and with which it was being more and more 
united. We have regarded this period as one 
of solemn preparation, — a period in which the 
Humanity went through the stages of physical 
and mental growth common to man, and in which 
it underwent deep spiritual struggles necessary to 
its perfection. 



66 FOOTPRINTS OF TEE SAVIOUR. 

We have now reached a deeply thrilling period. 
Thirty years have passed away in works of love 
and lowly service. In the midst of His toil or 
in moments of rest, in the home of Mary or out 
among the industries of men, the consciousness 
of His divine power has deepened, and His mis- 
sion has been fully unrolled. He has heard " the 
groaning of the prisoner/' and He has yearned 
" to loose the children of death." He has seen 
their sinfulness ; He knows the darkness of their 
ignorance. Their sorrows are upon Him ; their 
pains have entered Him. He longs to go forth 
to save, " to bind up the broken-hearted, to pro- 
claim liberty to the captives, and the opening of 
the prison to the bound : to proclaim the accept- 
able year of the Lord ; ... to comfort all that 
mourn." 

At length He issues forth. What were His 
words to the little family as He passed out of the 
village, how He went, whether alone or in com- 
pany with others, w r e know not. His entrance 
upon His ministry was as simple and as quiet as 
His entrance into the world. Not as a Philoso- 



THE DEPARTURE FROM NAZARETH. 67 

pher, with band of scholars to follow Him ; not 
as a powerful Hero, setting out amid the cheers of 
admiring crowds to win laurels of earthly victory, 
did He go forth. It was only the " Anointed/' 
the " Good Shepherd/' setting out without pomp 
to seek and to save the lost. 

He bends His steps towards Bethabara, where 
the Jabbok empties its waters into the Jordan. 
As He nears the ford, large numbers of people 
are seen coming from all directions towards the 
spot, — " fishermen from Galilee, shepherds from 
€ beyond Jordan/ vine-dressers from Judea, publi- 
cans from Jericho and Capernaum, soldiers going 
to war against the King of Arabia, proud Phari- 
sees and scornful Sadducees from Jerusalem." 
For four hundred years no prophet had been 
seen in Israel. But now a man had at last been 
" sent from God/' — a man so clearly beyond and 
above his age, so stern in his denunciations of sin, 
so scornful of hypocrisy, so peremptory in his 
summons to " repent ! " that his words sounded 
with an unearthly ring ; and the news was spread 
far and near that Elijah, or one of the prophets, 



68 FOOTPRINTS OF THE SAVIOUR. 

had appeared upon the scene. There he stood, 
with the dress and appearance of one of the 
prophets of old, with bronzed features and un- 
shorn locks, his raiment of camel's hair, and a 
leathern girdle about his loins. And as the mul- 
titudes gather about him, some of them demand- 
ing of him who he is, some questioning his 
authority to baptize, he tells them of the coming 
of One so far above him, so pure and immaculate, 
that he declares himself unworthy to perform 
even the slave-boy's service of unloosening the 
thongs of his sandals. 

Into this motley throng the Nazarene comes 
one day. In full sight of all He descends into 
the waters of the Jordan, that He may " fulfil all 
righteousness ; " and as He comes forth the 
heavens are opened, and lo, a voice, saying, 
"This is My beloved Son, in whom I am well 
pleased/' 

Forty days elapse, and then this same gentle 
Being comes forth from the wilderness and is 
again pointed out by the Baptist, who hails Him 
as " the Lamb of God." Five men — probably 



"BEHOLD THE LAMB OF GOD." 69 

John's disciples — join Him, and own Him as their 
Master. And He, instead of taking a path par- 
allel with the asceticism of the desert preacher, 
bends His steps towards a marriage festival, 
where life is flushed with love. 

And now, we seem to have the figure of the 
Christ fairly before us. We have before us One 
whose Humanity is, by incarnation, similar to our 
nature, capable of sorrow, temptation, and suffer- 
ing, but whose inmost soul is the Divine itself, 
with which it is coming into closer and closer 
union, — a Being so tender and merciful that there 
is nothing of pain or humiliation which the meek 
and the lowly One will not bear; so absolutely 
pure and true, that beneath every indignity or 
cruelty we shall see His divine majesty and glory. 
Men's blows will only prove how enduring He is ; 
and the crimson drops upon His visage, from 
what infinite depths His love is flowing ; and the 
crown, spiked upon His brow, will tell of a king- 
dom as high above the dominions of this world 
as the heavens are high above the earth ; and the 
cross will flash and flash again with glory. 



70 FOOTPRINTS OF THE SAVIOUR. 

And what has the Christ come forth to do? 
For at the outset we must recognize that He had 
a mission, — a mission so deeply and perfectly 
laid, so clearly seen, that He never swerved 
from it. It is crowding upon Him when, at the 
age of twelve, He says to Mary and Joseph, 
"Wist ye not that I must be about My Father's 
business ? " It is upon His heart when, in later 
years, He says, " I must work the works of Him 
that sent Me/' " I cast out devils/" is His mes- 
sage to Herod, u and I do cures to-day, and to- 
morrow, and the third day I shall be perfected." 
"Behold," He says to the disciples, His eyes 
fixed upon the closing scenes of His ministry, 
" we go up to Jerusalem : and the Son of Man 
shall be betrayed unto the chief priests and unto 
the scribes, and they shall condemn Him to death, 
and shall deliver Him to the Gentiles to mock, 
and to scourge, and to crucify Him : and the third 
day He shall rise again." He saw it all; for He 
knew, better than His enemies, all that the Scrip- 
tures had said of Him ; explaining to His disci- 
ples many of the prophecies with reference to 



A PERFECT MISSION. 71 

Himself, and rebuking Peter's bold attempt to 
rescue Him in the garden, by saying, u How, 
then, shall the Scriptures be fulfilled, that thus 
it must be ? " It is of a mission which has never 
for one moment been lost sight of, that He says 
at the close of His ministry, " I have finished the 
work which Thou gavest Me to do." 

Who ever planned a mission as this was 
planned ? Who was ever so true to it ? Our 
best intentions may never gain realization ; time 
will reveal defects in all our work ; we may have 
to try new methods, or modify our aims. If our 
life is an earnest one, and we are struggling for 
high ends, we shall more than once falter in the 
strife, and in the face of obstacles seemingly in- 
surmountable be tempted to give up in despair. 
But at the close of that most tried and afflicted 
ministry, the Son of Man could say, " I have fin- 
ished the work which Thou gavest Me to do." 
The work has been perfectly performed, because 
the end was so high, and the means so true, and 
the endurance so divine, and the self-sacrifice so 
absolute. In a few hours more His work will 



72 FOOTPRINTS OF TEE SAVIOUR. 

seem to be undone; for He will hang upon a 
cross, and His enemies will compass Him about 
like dogs, and defy Him to assert His power. 
But He expires with the cry of perfect victory on 
His lips: " It is finished!" 

This, also, is to be considered : the Saviour 
did not simply have previsions of His death ; 
He came to die. It was part of His divine 
plan. Differently from every martyr before or 
after Him, He had the power to lay down His 
life and the power to take it again; yet in the 
very consciousness of this power, He chose to die. 
And although His enemies appeared to overpower 
Him, His words were strictly true : " No man 
taketh My life from Me, but I lay it down of 
Myself." 

What, then, did the Christ come forth to do ? 
We state three great objects of His mission. 

1. The Lord came to redeem men from the 
tyrannous power which evil spirits were wielding. 
" He that committeth sin," He said, " is the ser- 
vant of sin ; " and the world, through long- 
continued evil, had reached a point of servitude so 



REDEMPTION. 73 



absolute, that the very power to resist evil was 
slipping away, exposing the race to the dominion 
of the infernal worlds. It was, therefore, a truly 
fearful moment when the Son of Man was 
"tempted of the Devil."" Could evil spirits, by 
subtlest wiles or show of force, overcome Him, 
or swerve Him from His purpose, the world was 
lost. If, on the other hand, He could overcome 
any and every form of evil they could devise ; if 
their attacks upon His love, — their attempts to 
animate Him with a desire to use force and 
over-ride man's freedom, to condemn His ene- 
mies, to vindicate Himself, to change His pur- 
pose, be it by never so slight a degree, anything, 
in a word, which would have taken from the 
perfection of that love, — if He could resist all 
such attacks, be tempted at every point, yet 
without sin, then, surely, He would lead cap- 
tivity captive, break up this monstrous tyranny, 
and bring the realms of darkness into such a 
condition of order that man would at least be 
free, henceforth and forever, to choose his own 
destiny. And this, as we shall hereafter show, 



74 FOOTPRINTS OF THE SAVIOUR. 

the Redeemer accomplished; not simply by the 
thrice- won victory in the wilderness, but by His 
continual resistance and conquest of evil. 

2. But this work of redemption, or restora- 
tion to spiritual freedom, momentous as it was, 
was not the only work that was accomplished. 
The Son of Man came also to save. It is not 
enough to strike the fetters from a bondman's 
limbs. For with his freedom come great respon- 
sibilities ; and unless he be helped and educated 
to bear properly those responsibilities, of what 
avail is his freedom? "Behold, thou art made 
whole/' the Saviour said to the impotent man 
whom He had healed; "sin no more, lest a 
worse thing come upon thee/' For thirty-and- 
eight years the man had been lying helpless and 
forlorn. Now he had his strength and freedom ; 
but his new life involved him in greater re- 
sponsibilities than before. The Christ, therefore, 
came not only to redeem, but to save. Let us 
note carefully what He did to become a Saviour. 

(a) And first, we can but notice the power of 
His divinely-human presence. From the moment 



A DIVINE FRIEND. 75 

that He enters upon His ministry, He presents 
Himself as One who is worthy of man's best 
faith and love. The people saw among them a 
Being supremely good. They felt that, and it 
touched them; it awed them. He impressed 
them as a true, kind friend, rather than as a 
philosopher, and it strengthened their confidence 
in Him. They could but feel how real His life 
was. They could see Him in their market-places, 
in their synagogues, amid their fields, on the lake 
in company with their fishermen. His home was 
the world and its people ; His themes, the cares, 
the temptations, the moral and spiritual sick- 
nesses of men ; His promises, deep peace of heart 
and life eternal for all who would resist evil as 
sin and keep the commandments. They knew 
He was far above them in wisdom and holiness. 
Yet there He was, sharing their existence, heal- 
ing their sick, blessing their little children, sitting 
at meat with those whose very touch would have 
been a defilement to the religious leaders. They 
knew His power, and heard Him say that at a 
word bright phalanxes of angels would rush to 



76 FOOTPRINTS OF THE SAVIOUR. 

His rescue. Yet they saw Him suffer His ene- 
mies to arrest Him, to bind Him, to strike Him, 
to spit upon Him, to nail Him to a cross, to 
mock Him in those last dark hours. Could such 
condescension and mercy, such self-restraint, fail 
to touch them ? And after the resurrection and 
the ascension into heaven, when His divinity 
and glory were no longer doubtful, think how 
it would affect them to look back in remembrance 
over those strange, hallowed years, when He dwelt 
so simply and lovingly among them. How the 
sinner and the slave would listen to the accounts 
of such a Saviour ! How that life of self-sacri- 
fice would warm and stir their hearts ! 

(<5) In addition to His loving presence, we 
note the saving power of His truth. We do not 
simply mean that everything which the Saviour 
said was true, that His teachings were sublime, 
and that they will ever underlie the best and 
purest civilizations. It was not truth in the ab- 
stract, which He gave to men. That might only 
have found its way to the schools and the acade- 
mies, and even there become merely the subject 



TRUTH THAT HAS POWER. 77 

of speculation and debate. The Lord's truth has 
power because He was Himself the Truth, — the 
Word made flesh. It cannot be separated from 
Him. It is Himself. He taught no truth which 
He did not Himself fulfil. 

" A new commandment I give unto you/' He 
said to the disciples, " that ye love one another ; 
as I have loved you, that ye also love one an- 
other." Observe that the Lord bases this "new 
commandment/' which shook the world to its 
centre, on His own experience, or life. It was 
not altruism in the abstract, concerning which 
one might speak or write from the standpoint 
of a cold and remote philosophy. " As I have 
loved you" — that was the truth. The Saviour 
had said very little to the disciples about His 
love. He had simply loved them; and they 
knew it ; they could not forget it ; it was truth 
to them. 

He would teach them the dignity of service; 
for they had been disputing among themselves 
for the chief seats at the supper. What does 
He do? He rises from His place without a 



78 FOOTPRINTS OF THE SAVIOUR. 

word, arrays Himself as a servant, takes a basin 
of water, and performs the menial duty of wash- 
ing their feet. He made honest service a truth 
to them. The act — the sight of their revered 
Master bending before them and laving their feet 
— smote them as no words could have done. 

In the truth of the Saviour, therefore, there 
is the power of a divinely loving life. And every 
word He spoke, every principle of holy, Chris- 
tian living He announced, was the exact expres- 
sion of what He fulfilled in His own nature. 

(c) Something more the Saviour came to give 
to men, — something without which the recol- 
lection of His life, or the knowledge of His 
truth, would have been of little avail ; that 
" something " which He signified when, after His 
resurrection, He breathed upon His apostles, 
saying, " Eeceive ye the Holy Spirit." The 
Spirit of the Saviour, flowing from Him in His 
divine and glorified Humanity, to quicken men 
to repentance, and to sanctify and strengthen all 
who would open themselves to His influence, — 
this, surely, is one of the fruits of His sacred 



"RECEIVE YE THE HOLY SPIRIT." 79 

ministry on earth. And the spirit of mercy, of 
truth, of self-sacrifice, whenever it moves the 
souls of men to-day, is the Spirit of Christ, who 
is still abroad seeking and saving the lost, draw- 
ing them to Himself, according to His promise : 
"And I, if I be lifted up, will draw all men 
unto Me." 

"I sought the Lord, and afterward I knew 

He moved my soul to it Who sought for me; 
It was not I that found, O Saviour true; 
No, I was found of Thee." 

3. One purpose more we notice as belonging 
to Christ's mission : the establishment of a uni- 
versal brotherhood among men. Under the fig- 
ure of the Good Shepherd preserving His flock, 
unwilling that even one should stray alone among 
the mountains, the Lord told the world how He 
was yearning to bring all men together and keep 
them under His pastoral care. " One fold under 
one Shepherd/' was His prayer. In His doctrine 
of love, which so entirely does away with class 
distinctions, there being but one Master, even 
Christ, all men being brethren, a certain power 



80 FOOTPRINTS OF THE SAVIOUR. 

of union was instantly felt, which drew men 
together in loving and spiritual communions. 
Eemembering how He had shared life with others, 
how He overlooked no one, how the poor and the 
sinful were dear to Him, the early Christians 
found "how good and how pleasant it is for 
brethren to dwell together in unity." "A new 
voice was heard: a new yearning upon earth, 
man pining at being severed from his brother, 
and longing to burst the false distinctions which 
had kept the best hearts from each other so 
long, — an infant cry of life, — the cry of the 
young church of God." Yet the cry was but 
an echo of that of the Saviour Himself, who, 
yearning for the spiritual unity of all men, prayed, 
"that they may be one as we are." Instructed 
and guided by the same Scriptures ; coming to- 
gether in the same Sacraments; looking to the 
same Saviour, — these Christian communities de- 
rived unwonted strength through their spiritual 
fellowship. And while we know that unholy 
ambitions and false teachings invaded the Church, 
and "the abomination of desolation" stood in 



THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST. 81 

the place where it ought not, we should also 
know that the Lord is still in the effort to unite 
mankind in one holy bond of faith and charity. 
And not until sectarian strife is hushed, and 
church rivalries are dead; not until faith and 
charity shall be united; not until the pride of 
wealth and fashion and numbers is scourged from 
the temple, and the salvation of man, be he high 
or low, rich or poor, wise or ignorant, be the 
one great impulse throbbing within the Church 
of the Saviour, — not until then will mankind 
be welded into that great Christian brotherhood, 
that universal kingdom of truth and love, which, 
when it comes, will be the coming of the kingdom 
of the Lord. 

This life, whose mission we have merely out- 
lined, we seek to know. In the belief that the 
Lord Jesus Christ is the Light of the world, and 
that His life is the light of men, we endeavor 
in what follows to make Him real to our thoughts 
and affections. For He Himself said, " Take My 
yoke upon you, and learn of Me." He placed 
Himself before the world that we might learn 
6 



82 FOOTPRINTS OF THE SAVIOUR. 

of Him; He accommodated Himself to men's 
conditions — lived with them, labored for them, 
died among them — that we might follow Him 
step by step ; be touched by His gentleness ; be 
sanctified by His sanctity ; be melted by His 
self-sacrifice ; and so, little by little, acquire deep 
love for Him, and find that for us who toil, and 
become " weary and heavy-laden/'' and suffer 
pains of heart and of conscience which cast us 
down, He is what no one else can be, — our Way, 
our Truth, our Life. 



THE SYMPATHY OP CHRIST. 



Saviour, shed Thy mercy o'er us; 

All our weakness Thou dost know; 
Thou didst tread the earth before us. 

Thou didst feel its keenest woe : 
Lone and dreary, faint and weary, 

Through the desert Thou didst go. 

Edmiston. 



IV, 
€fje <§>pmpatJ)p of €J>ri£t 



" For He knoweth our frame ; He remember eth that we 
are dust" 



/^\UR theme is a tender one. We should also 
find it a far-reaching and a helpful one. 
We may apply other attributes, — sinlessness, 
gentleness, self-sacrifice, patience, wisdom, majesty, 
— but unless there is a truth in the sympathy of 
Christ, there is a craving in us left unsatisfied. 
For in sympathy all these other qualities are, as it 
were, gathered up and made to minister to the 
needs of our humanity. 

Have we never reflected how powerless for the 
development of the highest qualities of good the 
divine life would be without this element of sym- 
pathy? Every presentation of God as a stern, 
distant monarch, scrutinizing our thoughts and 



86 FOOTPRINTS OF THE SAVIOUR. 

actions with piercing, omniscient eyes, prompt to 
visit every transgression with its exact measure of 
punishment, — as though He were more intent on 
the maintenance of His law and of His majesty 
than the condition of the transgressor, — this can- 
not but have a depressing and suppressing in- 
fluence. Under conditions like these, one could 
never get beyond the timid obedience of a servant; 
and however exact his obedience might be, he 
could never rise above the feeling that God was 
following him with an accusing eye, pursuing 
rather than defending him, ready to punish rather 
than befriend him; and so feeling, never rise 
out of the life of fear into that of love. Alle- 
giance under such conditions is a dread and a 
despair. 

We do not say that fear has not its place. 
With a stiff-necked and rebellious people the 
government of law and fear is a necessity. Only 
the result remains the same. The religion of fear 
never carries its disciples beyond the life of out- 
ward obedience, — that obedience which the 
trained .servant renders to a rigorous master. It 



SYMPJTHY AS A MEDIUM OF POWER. 87 

does not, it cannot bring them into sympathetic 
friendship, in which there is a closeness of soul 
through love. It is well that " the Law was 
given by Moses/'' but, blessed be God, " grace 
and truth came by Jesus Christ." And when 
Christ said to the men about Him, " A new com- 
mandment I give unto you, that ye love one an- 
other ; as I have loved you, that ye also love one 
another/' it was as much as to say that they could 
step out of the religion of fear, and that instead 
of being mere servants of the divine will they 
could henceforth be friends with it ; for the time 
had come when He could take them into the life 
of the purest love, and let them feel His sympathy, 
— the sympathy of Christ. 

Only we must understand what true sympathy 
is. Sympathy is not pity, although it is tender 
and pitiful. The apostle defines it when he says, 
" For we have not a High Priest which cannot be 
touched with the feeling of our infirmities, but 
was in all points tempted like as we are, yet with- 
out sin." In the apostolic sense, then, the sym- 
pathy of Christ is born of His sinless participation 



88 FOOTPRINTS OF THE SAVIOUR. 

in the experiences common to the infirm humani- 
ties of men. 

One may exercise pity without any partnership 
in suffering. We pity the heathen, not because 
we know of them through any experience, but 
because their uneducated, idolatrous condition 
appeals to us as a deplorable one. But where we 
have pity, the true missionary who has brought 
his life to theirs, entered into the shadow of their 
ignorances, prayed with them, spent himself for 
them, — he, surely, has sympathy. And in this 
kind of sympathy there is power, — the power of 
a loving life. And it is one of the beautiful dis- 
pensations of Providence, that out of the experi- 
ences which are common to us all we are enabled 
to minister to each other, as Christ ministered. 

Suppose for one instant that we could have 
grown up without experiencing sorrow and temp- 
tation. Suppose we had grown up, as we seem to 
think we ought to grow up, without a pain, with- 
out a tear — happy from the moment we became 
conscious of our being. And now, suppose we 
should be forced for the first time to meet sorrow. 



HELPING THE SORROWFUL AND TEMPTED. 89 

Death has entered our friend's household and 
taken away the treasure of his heart. But we 
know nothing of death, only life, — bright, thrill- 
ing life. Yet we go to him. We feel the un- 
wonted pressure of the hand, as though the trem- 
ulous fingers had a language for such sad times ; 
we note the look of pain, the swimming eyes, the 
sad, choking voice ; and with it all the struggle to 
keep the grief back, and smile in the old familiar 
way. What could we say or do, sitting there in the 
face of sorrow, yet knowing nothing of sorrow ? 

Or suppose we had in some way lived out of 
the reach of temptation, and should now come 
upon it for the first time. A friend, we will say, 
comes and falters out his story. He tells us how 
evil came to him, and fascinated him, until he 
seemed to lose his reason and gave himself up to 
it. And he tells us, too, how the sin has stung 
him with shame. What a poor, helpless friend 
we should be to such a man ! 

But what a difference, in either case, if we 
could have met him in a sympathetic knowledge 
of his trials ; if we, who had also known sorrow, 



90 FOOTPRINTS OF THE SAVIOUR. 

we, who had also wrestled with temptation, could 
have taken the man's hand in ours, and answered 
its pressure as if to say, " I know something of 
what you are passing through, and from my own 
pained and tempted heart I feel for you and suffer 
with you " ! Do we say there is no power in 
that? Must we not say, rather, that all the 
power which one life can communicate to another 
life comes through this medium of sympathy ? 

We do not forget that God is the true com- 
forter and healer of wounded spirits. But God 
works through many agencies, — angels, the 
Scriptures, the Church. And one agency, surely, 
is man, — man made tender and. sympathetic by 
what this life brings to us all. "When we know 
that men around us are suffering, morally and 
spiritually; when we know that because of poverty, 
ignorance, and evil there is a degree of wretched- 
ness from which we cannot and should not get 
entirely away ; that the lives of men are tempted, 
and their spirits jaded, and they carry sorrows 
which only the people of God can carry, — ah, 
when we think of these things, is there not some- 



PARTNERS IN LIFE. 91 

thing beautiful in the fact that we, because we are 
partners in one life, and have had the tides of joy 
and sorrow, peace and temptation ebb and surge 
through our members, can beckon for help one to 
another and lend a hand when life needs the 
touch of sympathy ! 

And now, if we apply this quality of sympathy 
to Christ, do we not see what a tremendous truth 
it carries with it ? If Christ has sympathy such 
as the apostle describes, it is because He, when 
in the flesh, shared with men their life of labor, 
trial, pain, temptation, and even death. And this, 
we are sure, is what Christians would feel. 

If one should say, " The Lord has pity on 
you," that does not reach our sorest need, if by 
this we are only to believe that He, from His im- 
maculate existence, looks down in commiseration 
upon us, who stand at such an infinite distance 
below Him ; looks down as if to say, " How poor, 
and weak, and sinful you are ! how unlike Me ! 
how I pity you ! " That is the religion of de- 
spair. What comfort would there be in pity like 
this? What inspiration in knowing that the 



92 FOOTPRINTS OF THE SAVIOUR. 

Lord measures His Being with ours ; and because 
where He is perfect w r e are always imperfect, 
where He is loving we are selfish, where He is 
wise we are ignorant, should pity us as we would 
pity a worm? 

But if w r e can feel that the Lord our Saviour 
has sympathy ; if we will believe what a prophecy 
said of Him, — " He knoweth our frame ; He re- 
membereth that we are dust," and believing this, 
feel that it is not our distance He is calculating, 
but the nearness with which His Divine Human- 
ity can come to the tempted humanities of men ; 
if, relying on the saying of the apostle, we will 
remember that because Christ did participate in 
our life, and was tempted like as we are, He has 
direct access to our souls, and that His life flows 
down to us in tides of divine sympathy, then the 
sympathy of Christ becomes the very perfection 
of comfort. 

Now, one significant fact which we cannot help 
noticing as soon as we begin this study, is that 
the Saviour Himself loved sympathy. u Will ye 
also go away ? w He said to the apostles, when, 



CHRIST LOVED SYMPATHY. 93 

having declared Himself "the Bread of life/' 
many who heard that sermon gave Him up and 
left Him. The crowd grew thinner and thinner, 
until only the twelve were left about Him ; and, 
as though the time had come when even they 
would leave Him, He said, "Will ye also go 
away ? " 

Or take His announcement on that last night 
in Jerusalem, when, out of the knowledge of what 
was to befall them all, He said, " Behold the hour 
cometh, yea, is now come, that ye shall be scat- 
tered, every man to his own, and shall leave Me 
alone : and yet I am not alone, because the Fa- 
ther is with Me." The time, the place, the form 
of the announcement, all seem to unite in telling 
us that their coming desertion was a sorrow to 
Him, and His human loneliness a trial. 

And as though to leave us in no doubt, one 
touching incident is related. They have entered 
the garden of Gethsemane. The Lord takes 
Peter, James, and John, and having gone a little 
way with them, He says, " My soul is exceeding 
sorrowful, even unto death; tarry ye here and 



94 FOOTPRINTS OF THE SAVIOUR. 

watch with Me." And going about a stone's 
cast away, He prostrates Himself in prayer. He 
comes back to where He left them, and finds 
them asleep; and bending over Peter (the man 
who was going to follow Him to prison and to 
death ! ) He says, " What, could ye not watch 
with Me one hour ! " Already He was entering 
the shadow of that loneliness which nothing but 
the divine presence within could brighten; yet 
not without a pang of sorrow that not one of 
those men had a hand of comfort to give Him, 
but must sleep the time away ! " And I looked," 
says an ancient prophecy, " and there was none to 
help ; and I wondered that there was none to 
uphold." 

Once more, — and this to show that the tender- 
ness of the risen Saviour was as before. He 
comes to Peter, and to the man whose heart was 
saddened by such bitter memories He says, " Lov- 
est thou Me ? " Three times, even as He had been 
denied three times, He asks the question. And 
three times the tempted, troubled man replies, 
" Yea, Lord, Thou kno west that I love Thee." 



WET CHRIST DESIRED SF3IPJTHT. 95 

Now, we are sure that in all these instances 
the Lord, in desiring the sympathy and love of 
His followers, desired it for a high end. For 
there is oftentimes among men a weak, an almost 
childish desire to be compassionated and loved ; to 
feel that our cares, our welfare, our affection are 
of the greatest consequence. This comes largely 
from a merely selfish vanity. But our Lord's 
desire for sympathy was a holy desire, — a de- 
sire which expressed itself in these words towards 
the close of that great prayer on the eve of his 
crucifixion : " Father, I will that they also be 
with Me where I am." One in spirit, one in 
love, one even in the suffering of self-sacrifice; 
a sympathy of this kind, going out from the dis- 
ciples to their Lord, and binding them by ties 
which nothing could break, — that is what Christ 
yearned for. 

We look now at the other side of our subject, 
— the sympathy of Christ. That one should set 
himself to prove the sympathy of Christ would 
seem to be as uncalled for as to prove His Being. 
For what we must feel is, that His whole life 



FOOTPRINTS OF THE SAVIOUR. 



was one of sympathy. He had sympathy for 
men individually, and in the mass. He looked 
over the multitudes that thronged about Him 
trying to touch Him, clamoring to be healed, 
and " He was moved with compassion on them, 
because they were tired and cast down, as sheep 
having no shepherd." Yet this did not pre- 
vent Him from feeling the frightened touch of 
an infirm woman, and healing her with the 
outflowing of sympathetic love. He could take 
the children in His arms and bless them ; or 
sit at meat with publicans and sinners ; or min- 
gle His tears with those of Martha and Mary 
at their brother's grave ; or bespeak forgiveness 
for the men who crucified Him; or soothe the 
sinking spirit of the dying malefactor by His 
side. 

These, we recognize at once, are not rare in- 
stances indicative of one special quality, but are 
parts of one divinely-human, sympathetic life. 
But now what we wish to know is, Does this 
sympathy come down to us from the Lord in His 
glorified Humanity ? 



LONGING FOR THE DIVINE NEARNESS. 97 

The seer of Patmos saw " One like unto the 
Son of Man/'' " But His head and His hairs were 
white like wool, as white as snow ; and His eyes 
were as a flame of fire ; and His feet like unto 
fine brass, as if they burned in a furnace." He 
heard those who were about Him praise Him; 
but it was no longer the fishermen of Galilee, in 
their homely dresses, but a multitude of the heav- 
enly hosts, arrayed in white robes, and palms in 
their hands. And this was their song : " Bless- 
ing, and glory, and wisdom, and thanksgiving, 
and honor, and power, and might, be unto our 
God for ever and ever ! " And we ask, Prom 
those angelic spheres, which seem so high because 
holiness is high, does the glorified Christ not 
simply think of us, but shed down His life to 
us, more powerfully even than our risen friends 
can do ? Has He direct access to us in joy and 
sorrow, in labor, in sickness, in death ? He is 
ascended where the material eye cannot follow 
Him; but is there nothing in His nature, or in 
the life He lived on earth, which binds Him to 
us with bonds of eternal sympathy? 

7 



98 FOOTPRINTS OF THE SAVIOUR. 

Oh, we have heard Him described as standing 
alone above the universe of worlds, and from 
some dizzy peak of Paradise watching this spin- 
ning earth below, as though the mere fact of look- 
ing at us, and following our painful movements 
with His eye, could comfort us ! But our faith 
should be, that the Saviour Christ does not merely 
gaze upon us ; but that from the nature of His. 
Divine Humanity, and from the urgency of His 
love, He is among us by the Spirit of His love 
and wisdom ; among the wrecks of life everywhere ; 
among our industries, our temptations, our births 
and deaths ; in and out through the doors of the 
soul, with as much power for help, did we but lay 
hold of Him, and as much sympathy as when 
men knew Him only as the Nazarene, who went 
about in His calm, heavenly way doing good. 

Faith in the sympathy of Christ includes these 
great facts : that in the day of need the Lord 
God took upon Himself a human nature, lived 
in it, admitted into it the thoughts and feelings 
of men; that He united His Humanity to the 
Divinity within, and thus glorified it, that is, 



HELP FROM THE HUMANITY OF GOD. 99 

made it divine; that through the Incarnation, 
with all the experiences it brought, there is added 
to the divine nature this plane, or degree, of 
human life which was sanctified; and that it 
is through this Humanity — the Humanity of 
God — that the divine love and wisdom flow out 
to us. And since they issue from that Humanity, 
they come to us in forms accommodated to our 
simplest or our direst needs. 

It was because God saw that men were getting 
farther and farther away from Him; that the 
inner doors of their minds were one after another 
closing against Him, so that a purely spiritual 
access to them was impossible; that the angels 
could no longer bring them His spirit ; and that 
their very Scriptures had lost all effect, through 
their traditions, — it was because God saw all this, 
that He provided one more means for reaching 
and influencing them ; took a human nature which 
could approach them from without; became the 
inmost of its life; gradually removed from it 
everything of an earthly or human origin, and 
as gradually brought the infinite, divine life into 



100 FOOTPRINTS OF THE SAVIOUR. 

union with it, until, at the end, the Humanity 
itself became divine, and a very part of God, — that 
part which is next to us, and which cannot but 
be in sympathy with everything that is human. 
God is invested, if we may so say, with humanity. 
And from that Humanity, made perfect and 
divine through temptation and suffering, there 
issues a sphere of love and wisdom as real and 
as suited, to our needs as the woman felt when 
she touched the border of His robe. 

And why, to consider one point more, is the 
sympathy of Christ of such avail ? "We may say, 
"I have the sympathy of friends. I have the 
sympathy of friends and kindred passed beyond 
the limits and limitations of this earthly life. If 
sympathy comes from mutual participation in the 
experiences of our existence, why is there such un- 
wonted power in the sympathy of Christ, seeing 
that others also have shared life with us ? n 

Turn back for a moment to the declaration of 
the apostle : " For we have not a High Priest 
which cannot be touched with a feeling of our 
infirmities; but was tempted in all points like 



ST3IPATHY AND SINLESSNESS. 101 

as we are, yet without sin." Without sin ; and 
that which is sinless is divine. Who of us, ay, 
who from among any of the saints of earth could 
say, "I have been tempted in all points like 
other men, and without sin " ? Who could say, 
" My sympathy for you is a sinless sympathy " ? 
And is it not this very element of sin — not 
temptation, be it observed, but sin — which is 
constantly limiting us? Sin does not prevent 
sympathy, but it limits its power, kills the life 
out of it. When the blind undertakes to lead 
the blind, must they not both fall into the 
ditch? 

But look at the other side of this truth. The 
more tempted, and at the same time the more 
sinless we are, the greater our capacity for true 
sympathetic power. The words of a good man 
knowing nothing of the temptations of the wine- 
cup might have but little effect upon the ine- 
briate, as compared with the words of one who 
had wrestled with and overcome the tempter, and 
thus knew the power of the demon that had his 
grip upon the soul of his brother man. 



102 FOOTPRINTS OF THE SAVIOUR. 

It is not enough, therefore, to declare that 
Christ shared our human experiences, and can 
be touched with a feeling of our infirmities. 
To this must be added the fact that He was 
tempted in all points like as we are, yet without 
sin. And this it is which makes His sympathy 
so full, so real, so powerful. For the love of 
His life, and the truth of His wisdom, flow down 
to us untrammelled and divine. And so the sym- 
pathy of Christ, when we understand it, is the 
loving presence and help of the Lord in His 
Divine Humanity; a sympathy, it is true, which 
we may be heedless of, or rudely reject, but which 
yearns on undiminished and undismayed. 

Sympathy for childhood and its simple life; 
for His Humanity passed through the conditions 
of child-life. And the Gospels tell us that the 
Child of Nazareth submitted Himself to Mary 
and Joseph ; and that " He increased in wisdom 
and stature, and in favor with God and man." 

Sympathy for youth, with its perplexities and 
impetuous throbbing life ; just as years ago He 
looked into the earnest face of the rich young 



JESUS BENDING OVER OUR HUMAN LIFE. 103 

ruler who knelt at his feet, and " beholding him 
loved him. - " 

Sympathy for honest work ; for the life of the 
Son of Man was one of natural and spiritual toil ; 
and none could say more touchingly or truly, 
"I am among you as one that serveth.*" 

Sympathy in temptation; for the Humanity 
of our blessed Lord was assailed at every point ; 
and He met the tempter face to face, and felt 
his power, and drove him back, saying, " Get 
thee behind Me, Satan ! " 

Sympathy with sorrow; for "He bore our 
griefs and carried our sorrows/' and was Himself 
" a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief/'' 

Sympathy in death. Mocked, buffeted, and 
spit upon, the Son of Man did not refuse to 
walk through the valley of the shadow of death. 
So He let His enemies lead Him to Calvary ; let 
them watch and taunt Him in His last hours. 
u And He made His grave with the wicked, and 
with the rich in His death; because He had 
done no violence, neither was any deceit in His 
mouth." But He arose from the dead, and 



104 FOOTPRINTS OF THE SAVIOUR. 

ascended into heaven, the Eesurrection and the 
Life for all the world, saying to every dying 
soul, "1 am He that liveth and was dead; and 
behold, I am alive forevermore, Amen ; and have 
the keys of hell and of death." 

And so, in whatever way we look, the Divine 
Humanity of Jesus Christ is seen to be in com- 
munion with our world and life, until we grow 
to feel that He makes our humanities His care, 
and feels for us, and sympathizes with us, — He, 
the great Refuge, the Divine Friend, standing 
among us and saying, as He said years ago, 
" Come unto Me, all ye that labor and are heavy 
laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke 
upon you, and learn of Me : for I am meek and 
lowly in heart ; and ye shall find rest unto your 
souls." 



THE TEMPTATIONS OF CHEIST. 



Oh, who is this of lowly mien, 
Bear Son of Man ! — tempted yet pure, 
Who buildeth love's foundation sure 

In human hearts where sin had been ? 
'Tis Christ the Nazarene ! 

Oh, who is this with wounded side, 

With crimsoned brow and nail-pierced hands, 
Before whose death-bowed head fierce bands 

Of dusky foes flee terrified ? 
} Tis Christ the Crucified! 

Oh, who is this in garb of war, 
Byed with the red of victory 
O'er hosts of sin and misery, 
Whose hand alone strife's burden bore? 
} Tis Christ the Conqueror ! 

c. s. 

Written for this volume. 



V. 
€fte €emptation£ of tffp&t 



" Who is this that cometh from Edom, with dyed gar- 
ments from Bozrah ? this that is glorious in His apparel, 
travelling in the greatness of His strength ?" 

" 1 that speak in righteousness, mighty to save." 

" Wherefore art Thou red in Thine apparel, and Thy 
garments like him that treadeth in the wine-vat ? " 

" I have trodden the wine-press alone ; and of the people 
there was none with Me. . . . And I looked and there was 
none to help; and I wondered that there was none to 
uphold." 

I ^ YEEY one must feel that the bare recital of 
— ' incidents in any life falls very far short 
of revealing that life. Without some knowledge 
of the underlying motives and struggles, without 
some idea of the hopes and doubts, the joys and 
sorrows that have combined and recombined 
within those incidents, we make but poor work 



108 FOOTPRINTS OF THE SAVIOUR. 

of our biographies. Can we doubt this, — that 
lives are rich and great just in proportion as their 
experiences are deep and spiritual ? 

"We turn to the great figures of the Gospels, 
and find them all to be human like ourselves : 
beings with passions, which, on a sudden, can 
fire the loving breast of John and drive him 
to the verge of invoking lightning to shatter the 
inhospitable dwellings of the Samaritans; with 
fears which turn the man of stone into a quick- 
sand of deceit; with doubts which wither the 
faith of a Thomas, until it seems to lie only in his 
finger-tips. We find all tempted, and but one 
sinless figure among them. And if this" seems 
strange, then we need to correct our ideas of the 
religious life, and instead of thinking of it as a 
tame, colorless existence, — a kind of passionless, 
nerveless thing, which should be dead alike to the 
pleasures and pains of this world, — to think of 
it as a life roused to a pitch of feeling, capable of 
a degree of temptation and remorse, restless for 
a time with great anxious thoughts such as a 
merely natural life could not experience. In a 



A LIFE WITH CHRIST. 109 

word, a life with Christ opens man's inner spirit- 
nature, and into it rush mighty influences which 
penetrate wide and deep, and bring out widely 
opposite possibilities of good and evil. And we 
cannot justly compare such a life, which has been 
deepened, expanded, purified by repentance, with 
one which, though it should be outwardly correct 
and agreeable, has never got beyond its morality, 
never lost itself in the intricacies and solemnities 
of a life with God, having lived contentedly on 
the outermost rim of its humanity. 

Look at the life of Christ. The prophet, in 
spiritual description of Him, says, " He was 
a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief." 
Yet we do not understand these words to mean 
that outwardly our Lord's life was a sad or 
dejected one. There were times, indeed, when 
He did not conceal His sorrow. But there is 
abundant evidence in the Gospels that for the 
most part the life which men saw Him living 
was serene ; that it did not seem distressed and 
cast down like ours. He did not come with the 
cold austerity of the desert preacher, but entered 



110 FOOTPRINTS OF THE SAVIOUR. 

with such kindly companionship into the life of 
the men about Him, that the strict religionists 
of the day pointed their scornful fingers at Him, 
and said, "Behold, a gluttonous man, and a 
wine-bibber; a friend of publicans and sinners." 
He travelled the white, dusty roads, going afoot 
from village to village ; He entered the boats of 
the fishermen, and taught the curious listeners 
that stood at the lake's edge ; He would sit on 
the grassy slope of some mountain, with the flow- 
ers about Him, and tell the people of a Provi- 
dence more tender of their spiritual growth than 
of the blooming lilies ; He went in and out of the 
homes of the people, healing all manner of sick- 
ness and all manner of disease, soothing many a 
smarting spirit with the balm of His love. And 
yet, if we were to put together all the incidents of 
His life, — the things, that is, which men saw, — 
would that reveal the Saviour Christ? Could we, 
from a mere knowledge of such incidents, know 
Him? 

When His earthly ministry drew to a close, 
on the night of the last supper, looking into 



THE INNER LIFE OF CHRIST. Ill 

the anxious faces of the little company around 
Him, He summed up His life and their min- 
istry in these significant words : " Ye are they 
which have continued with Me in My tempta- 
tions." How touching, how stirring, and yet 
how unexpected these words are ! " Ye are they 
which have continued with Me in My tempta- 
tions." He does not say, " Ye are they whom I 
called from the shores of Galilee ; " or, " Ye are 
they who have witnessed My miracles and heard 
My teachings ; " but, " Ye are they which have 
continued with Me in My temptations." Let us 
note carefully that in saying this the Lord is 
summarizing the experiences of His life. He 
is not looking back to some one dread experience, 
such as the temptation in the wilderness. He is 
looking over His entire ministry, and pointing 
out a class of experiences which have " con- 
tinued " throughout that ministry. Viewed in 
this way, these words are most remarkable. They 
give us an important clew to His real inner 
life. 

Now, in studying the temptations of Christ we 



112 FOOTPRINTS OF THE SAVIOUR. 

need to have a true idea of temptation itself. To 
many, temptation means simply an allurement to 
do wrong. Evil presents itself in an attractive 
form, and the enticement is called a temptation. 
And while it is not denied that this is one form of 
temptation, still the temptation-combats which no 
really Christian man ever yet escaped need a fuller 
classification. Granted that in its early develop- 
ment the Humanity of Christ was not exempt 
from even this kind of temptation, — for His 
experiences included all of ours, from the simplest 
to the subtlest, — still, is it conceivable that He 
was involved in one life-long struggle to with- 
stand the common allurements of the world and 
of the flesh ? Let us not shrink from the Lord's 
statement that He was tempted, and tempted con- 
tinually. But if we make this fact to mean that 
He was never free from the gross, the cheap en- 
ticements to wrong which affect us, we inevitably 
degrade those struggles, and rob them of their 
chief solemnity. Because of this gross concep- 
tion, many shrink from contemplating the temp- 
tations of their Saviour. It pains them to 



IMPERFECT IDEAS OF TEMPTATION, 113 

think about them. It troubles them to under- 
stand them. 

Furthermore, many instinctively associate sin 
with temptation; and this only adds to their 
perplexity. They seem to feel that temptation 
is a mark of evil. The really pure man, to them, 
is unassailable. But this, too, is a fallacy, and, 
in the light of Christ's experiences, a serious 
fallacy. There is no virtue in being untempted. 
The vessel that sails away, and spreads her great 
white wings to favorable winds, and is borne 
smoothly and swiftly on prosperous currents, is 
no better than one that has to sail close-hauled, 
and goes plunging and staggering through the 
storm, masts and cordage strained near to snap- 
ping, waves breaking over her, and every man 
on board doing his utmost to keep her afloat. 
The storms come, be sure of that ! God's way 
is in the sea, and His path in many waters. And 
we have taken a pitifully poor view of the Chris- 
tian life, if we look at it as a means of escaping 
those great soul-struggles which, say what one 
will, require the highest courage, and put the 



114 FOOTPRINTS OF THE SAVIOUR. 

thews and sinews of the spirit to the severest 
test. Temptation, bravely resisted, does not mar 
a man. It is no sign of sinfulness. 

And so, when Christ says He was tempted con- 
tinually, that does not take away from the great- 
ness or the sanctity of His nature. Nay, when 
w r e remember that He was tempted and was yet 
sinless, do we not involuntarily draw nearer to 
Him, that in learning of His struggles, some- 
thing of strength and consolation may flow down 
to us? 

What can we say of those temptations ? The 
subject is not a difficult one, if certain facts are 
understood. Man is subject to influences from 
both the heavenly and the infernal worlds. Be- 
tween the two his spirit often falters. He in- 
herits, as we all must see, a nature which is 
full, not of sins, but of tendencies to sin. And 
the struggle which ensues when he is assailed, 
and his evil proclivities aroused, — the struggle, 
the wrestle, with its moments of fearful uncer- 
tainty, — this we call temptation. 

At first these struggles are of a simple nature. 



DEGREES OF TEMPTATION. 115 

The evils aroused are of a gross, almost material 
kind, and hence are more easily seen and grap- 
pled with. But if the spiritual life advances, 
these struggles become of a more interior charac- 
ter, and are harder to control. And the farther 
one advances, the more subtle are the attacks 
made upon his life. They take less and less 
tangible shapes, and become known to him, often- 
times, only through a certain sense of desolation 
and misery, prompting the spirit to doubt and 
despair. 

Apply this to Christ. He took upon Himself 
a human nature like our own. It was more than 
a physical body. It was a nature with a capacity 
to think and feel and suffer as we do ; the differ- 
ence being, that we have a created, finite soul, 
whereas Christ's Humanity had the one uncreated, 
infinite soul. But because the nature He took 
on was human, it was approachable, like ours, 
by evil. And the Gospels say that these assaults 
upon His Humanity were continual. Moreover, 
they grew in interior intensity. 

We do not attempt to define them in their 



116 FOOTPRINTS OF THE SAVIOUR. 

subtlest forms. There were pains of spirit which 
we can never know. None but the keenest an- 
guish could have brought the bloody sweat upon 
His brow. But there are some things which we 
may partly understand, and by them gain a some- 
what clear idea of the temptations which the Son 
of Man endured. These we would study. 

The Lord, when He entered upon His public 
ministry, came forth in the full consciousness of 
His divine power. He knew, as He afterwards 
said, that He had the power to lay down His 
life, and the power to take it again. He knew, 
before He entered Cana of Galilee, that He could 
turn water into wine. He knew, moreover, that 
He had power on earth to forgive sins ; that He 
was man's great deliverer, man's eternal Lord and 
Master. "Ye call Me Master, and Lord; and 
ye say well, for so I am." There is no shrinking 
from this supreme position. But this very con- 
sciousness of power and divinity was exposed to 
the self-love of the whole human race, and to 
the love of dominion of all the infernal worlds. 

To what temptations would this subject Him ? 



"A BRUISED REED WILL HE NOT BREAK." 117 

There would be the temptation to compel hu- 
man allegiance, to force the understanding to 
know Him and the heart to love Him. For the 
Saviour yearned to be known and received, that 
He might give men of His joy and make their 
joy full. How sweet the prayer at the close of 
His ministry : " Holy Father, keep through Thine 
own name those whom Thou hast given Me. . . . 
While I was with them in the world, I kept them 
in Thy name : those that Thou gavest Me I 
have kept." It gives us but a glimpse of the 
joy our Saviour had felt during those three years 
in keeping these men within the sphere of His 
love. Then we turn to the world, and find how 
blind and unresponsive it had been. He had 
come unto His own, but His own received Him 
not. The children of Jerusalem would not come 
under the wings of His mercy. They misunder- 
stood Him, they maligned Him, they injured 
Him. Ah ! from what a mighty depth of sorrow 
must that touching cry have risen, " The Son of 
Man hath not where to lay His head ! " It was 
at men's souls that He was knocking; and the 



118 FOOTPRINTS OF THE SAVIOUR. 

human heart was the pillow on which He longed 
to lay His head. 

And do we think He was never tempted to 
break down those bolted doors and compel His 
people to receive Him ? Yet we know that to 
the very last moment He left men free. He 
fairly pleads with the world, and says, " Take My 
yoke upon you, and learn of Me : for I am meek 
and lowly in heart ; and ye shall find rest unto 
your souls \" but He is true to the prophecy 
which had said of Him, " He shall not strive nor 
cry, neither shall any man hear His voice in the 
streets." He will be the Good Shepherd : always 
leading, never driving ; calling the sheep by name, 
but not injuring them with stones. 

Perhaps there is another side to this, which 
we should not be afraid to examine. The Lord 
was not only conscious of His power, but con- 
scious also of His absolute purity. He knew 
that silence must be the only answer of His bitter- 
est enemies when He asked, " Which of you con- 
vinced Me of sin?" He knew that He was 
the very Truth itself. He knew that He was 



MISJUDGED, PERSECUTED, BUT SILENT. 119 

laying down His life for the world, from the deep- 
est and tenderest love. u In His love and in His 
pity He redeemed them." Yet think how the 
world requited Him ! how it blasphemed Him ! 
how it scourged Him ! how it killed Him ! He 
knew the enormity of the sin. Did the spirits 
of evil never torture Him with suggestions to 
avenge, to condemn? Was He not driving 
them off from His worn and suffering Humanity, 
when, as the cross was slowly lifted, He prayed, 
"Father, forgive them, for they know not what 
they do"? 

And then, there was the temptation to vindi- 
cate Himself ; to answer every false accusation ; 
to resist by argument every denial. Do we not 
know what it is to be spoken against falsely? 
Do we not know what it is, not simply to be mis- 
understood, but misrepresented; to have our aims 
misjudged; to have evil motives attributed when 
we feel we are innocent ? And do we not know, 
too, what an effort is required to keep silent at 
such times ; or if not to remain wholly silent, to 
answer in the spirit of peace and love ? 



120 FOOTPRINTS OF THE SAVIOUR. 

But who was ever maligned as our Lord was ? 
When brought to trial, false witnesses were sub- 
orned to swear to some guilt. But He was dumb 
with silence ; He held his peace even from good ; 
it was only His sorrow that was stirred. He 
bore with silence the coarse witticisms of Herod 
and his soldiery. Twice He was brought before 
Pilate, stood face to face with His accusers ; but 
He let them demand His life, for He had long 
since given it to them. 

" He was brought as a lamb to the slaughter ; 
and as a sheep before her shearers is dumb, so He 
opened not His mouth." 

One other form of temptation the Lord had 
to endure. From the moment He began His 
ministry, He knew to what it would lead. He 
saw the hill of Calvary long before He ascended 
it. Several times He pointed it out to His dis- 
ciples. Shortly before the dread scenes were 
enacted, He told them how " He must go unto 
Jerusalem, and suffer many things of the elders, 
and chief priests, and scribes, and be killed, and 
be raised again the third day." One loving man 



PETER'S LOVE AS A STUMBLING-BLOCK. 121 

stood listening there, who could not bear to think 
of such sufferings coming to His Master ; and he 
cried out at once, " Be it far from Thee, Lord ; 
this shall not be unto Thee." But the Lord turned 
to Peter and said, " Get thee behind Me, Satan ; 
thou art a stumbling-block unto Me." " Satan ! " 
" stumbling-block ! " How plainly these words 
reveal the temptation put in His way by this 
honest man's love. " Shall we smite with the 
sword? " the little band whispered eagerly when 
the mob came out against Him. And before an 
answer can be given, Peter has rushed upon the 
servant of the high priest. But Jesus rebuked 
His champion ; and He said, " Thinkest thou that 
I cannot now pray to My Father, and He shall 
presently give Me more than twelve legions of an- 
gels ? But how, then, shall the Scriptures be 
fulfilled, that thus it must be ? " The temptation 
fell from Him ; He would not refuse to drink the 
cup. 

And this brings us to consider the direst temp- 
tation of all, — the Passion of the Cross. 

Three years of loving work among all classes of 



122 FOOTPRINTS OF THE SAVIOUR. 

men have passed away; and now the Eedeemer 
of all souls has come up to Jerusalem for the last 
time. For the last time He has tasted of the 
fruit of the vine, until it shall be drunk in new- 
ness in the kingdom of heaven. The meal is 
over. The last admonitions to the little company 
have ended in prayer for their spiritual safety and 
consecration. The men, with their Master, have 
sung the great Messianic Psalm. And now they 
pass out into the night. They go through the 
eastern gate, then down a steep path, then over 
the brook Kedron, into a garden guarded to-day 
by " eight aged and gnarled olive-trees, upon 
which the suns of many centuries have risen and 
set." 

" Into the woods my Master Went, 
Clean forspent, forspent. 
Into the woods my Master came, 
Forspent with love and shame. 
But the olives they were not Mind to Him, 
The little gray leaves were kind to Him: 
The thorn-tree had a mind to Him, 
When into the woods He came. 

"Out of the woods my Master went, 
And He was well content. 



THE PASSION OF THE CROSS. 123 

Out of the woods my Master came, 
Content with death and shame. 
When Death and Shame would woo Him last, 
From under the trees they drew Him last : 
'T was on a tree they slew Him — last, 
"When out of the woods He came." 

We do not attempt to draw the scene of the 
Passion. Men saw the evidences of suffering, in- 
deed, not the deepest causes of it. Can we hear 
Christ say to His disciples, "Fear not them 
which kill the body/' and then feel that it was 
the knowledge of approaching death that forced 
the cry, " If it be possible, let this cup pass from 
Me ! " We dare not say there were no physical 
pains ; but this we may know : death had no ter- 
rors for the Eesurrection and the Life. Beyond 
the heights of Calvary, He could look into the 
serene vistas of the higher world. Men might 
mock Him, scourge Him, nail Him to a tree ; He 
would not resist them, for had He not come to 
lay down His life for their sakes ? And do we, 
in thought, gather about His cross, pitying His 
pains as though they were only of the body, and as 
if it were so hard for the Humanity to die ? Why, 



124 FOOTPRINTS OF THE SAVIOUR. 

that is what the priests and elders thought ! That 
is what the gaping multitude thought ! and it 
only made their triumph seem the greater. But 
Christ said never a word about bodily pain and 
fear. He took Peter, James, and John into the 
inner recess of the garden, and told them the se- 
cret of it all when He said, " My soul is exceed- 
ing sorrowful, even unto death." All through 
life, as we have seen, the Humanity of our Lord 
had been assaulted. Every form of evil or falsity 
which can invade a human nature, He met and 
put down. Their multitude is pointed out in 
those prophetic words : " They are more than the 
hairs of mine head." Then came the final on- 
slaught ; the one last desperate effort of infuriated 
spirits to break through His Humanity and 
make it captive. 

There was a suffering greater than physical, 
however torturing that may have been, — pains 
striking deeper than the flesh. And when our 
Saviour cries, " My God, My God, why hast Thou 
forsaken Me ! " we may know that the Humanity 
is being wrung with keenest spiritual agonies, 



TWO RESULTS OF CHRIST'S VICTORY. 125 

and that the life which had long continued in 
temptation-combats is closing in one final, deci- 
sive, appalling struggle. 

And what was accomplished by these spiritual 
struggles ? First, they were the means by which 
everything earth-born was put away and the Hu- 
manity made divine. According to this law we 
ourselves are regenerated. For just in propor- 
tion as we triumph over evil, good takes its place. 
The other result was the subjugation of the in- 
fernal worlds, and man's consequent redemption ; 
that is, his restoration to spiritual freedom. 

To any one accepting the Gospels, there can 
be no doubt that the Saviour came in conflict 
with the spirits of evil. It was one of the first 
things which the people did, when the Lord's 
fame began to spread abroad, to bring those 
w T ho were possessed with devils. What a reve- 
lation of man's condition ! For the Gospels 
speak of it as quite a common thing. And two 
facts we notice in the Saviour's contact with 
demoniacs, — the devils always knew Him; the 
devils always feared Him. 



126 FOOTPRINTS OF THE SAVIOUR. 

They knew Him far better, oftentimes, than 
the men and women about Him. And why ? 
and how ? Evidently because by His divine 
presence He was effecting a judgment or sepa- 
ration among them, and interposing Himself be- 
tween them and the human beings they would 
have enslaved. " Let us alone/' cried one of 
them ; " what have we to do with Thee, Thou 
Jesus of Nazareth ? Art Thou come to destroy 
us ? I know Thee who Thou art, the Holy One 
of God." He was teaching in the synagogue 
at Capernaum, when suddenly the demoniac fell 
writhing and howling at the Saviour's feet. We 
can imagine the men and women springing to 
their feet in a panic of excitement and fear ; and 
He, the new, the ridiculed Teacher, the one calm 
figure among them ! u Hold thy peace, and come 
out of him," He simply says. And with one 
final struggle, one last shout of anger and of pain, 
the unclean spirit is gone. There lies the man, 
released from his awful bondage. That, surely, 
was his redemption, his restoration to spiritual 
freedom through the power of the Eedeemer. 



CHAMPION OF OUR SPIRITUAL LIBERTIES. 127 

And what the Lord did for that man He did 
for the whole human race. Only, in this and 
some other instances. the work was visible. He 
let men see what He was doing for them spirit- 
ually. He let them into this large secret of His 
ministry; namely, that He was remanding the 
spirits of darkness to their own abodes, and 
breaking up a tyranny which they had acquired 
through man's sinfulness. For men were in 
bondage, and He told them so. And He told 
them that He was their deliverer, — ay, that He 
was the One whom their Scriptures had long fore- 
told would come " to proclaim liberty to the cap- 
tives, and the opening of the prison to the bound." 
So He let evil assault Him, that He might over- 
come its tyranny and lead captivity captive. In 
this consists our redemption. "Let the re- 
deemed say so, whom He hath redeemed from the 
hand of the enemy/' 

We consider one point more. It may be 
asked, " How could temptation cause the Son of 
Man a moment's anguish, if, as is maintained 
throughout these pages, His inmost soul was 



128 FOOTPRINTS OF THE SAVIOVE. 

Divinity itself? Could not evil be driven away- 
like so much chaff, which a breath of wind will 
scatter? But we are to remember that the as- 
saults were made upon the Humanity, and that 
it lay with the Humanity to yield or to turn to 
the Divinity within, and meet evil with a holy 
strength. The Humanity felt the assaults; and 
had it not been unfailingly true to its divine na- 
ture, might in some moment have proved as frail 
as we are. There is always the possibility with 
us to lay hold, as it were, of the divine nature the 
instant evil assails us, and meet it with ample 
strength. But no ! we either succumb at once, 
or else we rely upon ourselves ; and so we suffer 
defeat again and again. But this is precisely what 
the Humanity of Christ did not do. And its per- 
fection consisted in its unvarying fidelity to the 
divine nature within. It was stormed and as- 
saulted, and with what bitterness we shall never 
know. As with a man, it seemed to struggle 
alone. But always it conquered, — conquered by 
using, as of itself, the powers of the divine Father- 
hood within. 



LESSONS AND REBUKES. 129 

What lessons come down to us from those great 
trial-hours of Christ ! And what rebukes ! 
Think of it ! Nothing that evil could devise, that 
He did not meet and put down ! Tempted at all 
points, but without sin ! So calm and gentle in 
His outward bearing ! So true, so enduring 
in struggles men could not see ! And we are 
tempted, too, — tempted, and we often fall ; 
tempted, and we sometimes triumph. And when 
we triumph, it is through the conquering power 
of Christ, who suffered and overcame that He 
might give us the strength to suffer and overcome. 
For, in the language of the apostle, u In that He 
Himself hath suffered being tempted, He is able 
to succor them that are tempted/ ' Ay, for 
this is what He said : " Be of good cheer : I have 
overcome the world." 



THE SANCTITY OF CHRIST. 



Come, my Way, my Truth, my Life! 
Such a Way, as gives us breath ; 
Such a Truth, as ends all strife ; 
Such a Life, as killeth death. 

Come, my Light, my Feast, my Strength! 
Such a Light, as shows a feast ; 
Such a Feast, as mends in length; 
Such a Strength, as makes his guest. 

Come, my Joy, my Love, my Heart! 
Such a Joy, as none can move ; 
Such a Love, as none can part ; 
Such a Heart, as joys in love. 

Herbert. 



VI. 
€Jje £anctitp of C&trigt. 

" For their sakes I sanctify Myself, that they also 
might be sanctified." 

r I ^HE sanctity of Christ is essential to Chris- 
tianity; for Christianity is essentially the 
following of the Lord Jesus Christ. Differently 
from, every other teacher, He places Himself be- 
fore His teachings. It is not merely a new phi- 
losophy, or code of ethics that He brings : it is 
Himself. His claim is far greater than that He 
knows the truth and can therefore proclaim it. 
He is more than a teacher of it. He declares 
Himself to be the perfect embodiment of it. In 
short, He is the Truth, — the Word made flesh; 
the Truth living and breathing. 



134 FOOTPRINTS OF THE SAVIOUR. 

Now, every true teacher is presumably in the 
effort to come into correspondence with his 
teachings. But of whom, save the Lord Jesus 
Christ, could we say that the correspondence 
attained is so perfect and absolute as to en- 
title him to declare himself to be the truth? 
Socrates discourses beautifully of immortality. 
What if he had said to those gathered about 
him in his cell, " I am the Resurrection and the 
Life"! 1 

And with this difference in the teacher comes 
a difference in method. The human teacher 
pleads for the truth as something apart from 
himself; he presents it as something vastly 
superior to himself. He could not justly say, 
" If you would know the truth, study me." He 
would say, rather: "Do not judge of the truth 
by what I am. Consider it apart from me. 
Judge of it as though I had not spoken it. 
The truth is superior to me. I am not that 
Light, but am come simply to bear witness of 
that Light. I am only a voice crying out in 

1 See Note C. 



THE TRUTH AND THE TEACHER. 135 

the wilderness, 'Make straight the way of the 
Lord/" 

But the Christ called upon men to believe first 
of all in Him. For proof of His divine claims, 
He bade men look at His life and works. " The 
works that I do in My Father's name/' He said 
to those who were questioning His claims, " they 
bear witness of Me." " If I do not the works of 
My Father, believe Me not." To His apostles He 
appealed, " Believe Me for the very works' sake." 
From whatever class His followers came, they 
always came in answer to this one, simple sum- 
mons, " Follow Me." Why does the Lord insist 
upon this personal devotion? Not, surely, that 
it may add to His glory, — that is already in- 
finite, — but because without this personal ele- 
ment, religion becomes a cold, intellectual, almost 
hopeless thing. The Lord came to the world and 
taught it deep, searching truths. He stated the 
conditions of salvation and the elements of a 
heavenly character. It is rightly claimed that the 
Sermon on the Mount contains the rules of the 
highest possible morality and religion. But what 



136 FOOTPRINTS OF THE SAVIOUR. 

if the Saviour had simply appeared on that one 
day and preached that sermon ? What if we 
knew nothing of Him who sat on the mountain 
slope and said, " Blessed are the poor in spirit" ! 
Truth in the abstract ! Cold rales telling us how 
we should live ! How long would Christianity 
have lasted ? What power of resistance would it 
have had against persecution ? How far beyond 
a few schoolmen, who might have studied them 
as they studied the philosophy of Plato, would 
Christ's teachings have spread ? Would the com- 
mon people have flocked to the academies to learn 
of this new religion? And if they had, would 
they have been affected by it, or even understood 
it, in its impersonal form ? Was it not its per- 
sonal quality which gave it such power, — the 
life that had been lived for them ; the sufferings 
which had been endured for them ; the death that 
had included them ? The truth became clear and 
dear to them just so far as they saw it in Him. 
And this was in accordance with the Saviour's 
wish; for He had said, "Take My yoke upon 
you, and learn of Me/' 



BASIS OF CHRISTIAN CONFIDENCE. 137 

Since, then, Christ identifies Himself with the 
truth of His religion, and since this new religion 
consists primarily in the acceptance of Him, then 
the absolute sanctity of Christ is of vital impor- 
tance. And by sanctity, as applied to Christ, we 
mean holiness. We mean especially the holiness 
of His Humanity : the descent of the Divine 
into the Human, — a process which was synchro- 
nous with the displacement of maternal inheritances 
through temptation-combats, and which consti- 
tuted what He called His glorification. If this 
sanctity can be established, the Saviour stands 
upon a distinctly higher eminence than that at- 
tained by any teacher or reformer, however illus- 
trious. If His sanctity cannot be maintained, 
the conclusion is obvious. Upon what grounds 
do we base our belief in the sanctity of the Lord 
Jesus Christ? 

We notice, first of all, Christ's own testimony. 
And in doing this we need to remember that it 
is the testimony of One who set the highest value 
upon humility. He knew how inevitably self- 
exaltation ends in abasement ; nor would He allow 



138 FOOTPRINTS OF THE SAVIOUR. 

the rich young ruler to call Him, out of mere 
compliment, "good." He does not deny the 
quality, for He announces Himself as " the Good 
Shepherd." But those who call Him good must 
do so knowing what it involves; "for none is 
good, save One, that is God." He commends 
repentance, and prefers the publican's cry of re- 
morse to the smooth self-gratulation of the Phari- 
see. He invites the world to come to Him, not as 
One who glories in His sanctity, but for the very 
reason that He is "meek and lowly in heart." 
The claim of sanctity, coming from the lips of 
such an One, compels our thoughtfulness. 

Let us observe Him in the presence of His 
enemies on the night of His arrest. He is stand- 
ing bound before the high priest. Although it 
is midnight, the chief priests, scribes, and elders 
have been summoned together by the news that 
the Nazarene has been arrested and is now in 
the high priest's palace. They needed no urging, 
we may be sure, but hurried through the dark, 
narrow streets to the palace, crossed the court- 
yard where a number of servants and officers were 



BEFORE THE HIGH PRIEST. 139 

huddled about a fire, — poor, despairing Peter 
among the rest, — then up a flight of steps to 
the council chamber where sat the high priest 
in his pontifical robes. Yes ; it was no mistake. 
There stands the Nazarene bound with cords and 
guarded by officers. Taken at last ! He who had 
told them that the publicans and harlots would 
go into the kingdom of God before them; who 
had likened them to whitened sepulchres, is at 
length in their power ! Now He shall answer 
for all He has said! 

So Caiaphas asks Him about His disciples and 
about His doctrine. And He answers him, "1 
spake openly to the world ; I ever taught in the 
synagogue, and in the temple, whither the Jews 
alway resort, and in secret have I said nothing. 
"Why askest thou Me? Ask them which heard 
Me, what I have said unto them; behold, they 
know what I said." His appeal is to the world. 
He challenges it to bring forth a single accusation 
against Him. 

But here the proceedings are rudely interrupted; 
for one of the officers turns angrily upon Him, 



140 FOOTPRINTS OF THE SAVIOUR. 

and in violation of all justice, decency, or man- 
liness, strikes the bound Teacher a blow in the 
face. And the despised and injured One turns 
to the ruffian, and, still challenging disproofs of 
His innocence, says with gentle dignity : " If I 
have spoken evil, bear witness of the evil: but 
if well, why smitest thou Me? " 

Let us observe Him on another occasion. He 
is in one of the temple courts. As usual, many 
are about Him. He is telling His hearers of 
their spiritual slavery, — a theme most unpopular 
to a Jew, for a portion of his morning prayer ran 
thus : " Blessed be the Lord our God, King of 
the universe, who has made me a free man." 1 
He tells them that His Truth will make them 
free. But they become incensed, dispute His 
statements, and accuse Him of madness. But 
He asks them one and all, " Which of you con- 
vinceth Me of sin ? " 

That which appeals to us in both these inci- 
dents is Christ's plea of absolute sinlessness. He 
has taught openly where all could hear Him; 
1 Quoted in Geikie's " Life and "Words of Christ." 



SINLESSNUSS. 141 



He has lived in plain sight of friends and foes ; 
He has been watched; His enemies have tried 
to entrap Him in some evil word or deed ; and 
yet He declares His sinlessness, and summons 
His very enemies as His witnesses. Pilate, who, 
to ease his troubled conscience, would gladly 
have found some defect in his prisoner, is com- 
pelled to say, "I find in Him no fault at all." 
Judas feels the money received for his Master's 
life like a millstone about his neck; and that 
which rives his heart is the knowledge that he 
has betrayed innocent blood. His crime turns 
black before him as he realizes that he has 
sinned against the sinless One. 

And yet we realize how inadequately this word 
" sinless " expresses the truth of Christ's sanctity. 
It is too negative. It is nerveless and colorless. 
Not to be evil is one thing ; to be genuinely and 
positively righteous is quite another thing. Now, 
Christ's life was of all things supremely positive. 
Let any one put into His mouth such utterances as 
these : " I am not selfish/' " I am not worldly," 
" I am not evil/' and we feel at once that the whole 



142 FOOTPRINTS OF THE SAVIOUR. 

conception of Christ is changed, if not destroyed. 
But instead, what do we find? The one truly 
positive life. Sinless? Yes. Blameless? Yes. 
Not, however, by mere self-repression, but by 
absolute holiness. 

We cannot open a single page of our Gospels 
without meeting this positive element. How 
does He meet the sneer of His enemies, "Thou 
art not yet fifty years old, and hast Thou seen 
Abraham ? " This is what He says : " Verily, 
verily I say unto you, before Abraham was, I 
am." He claims the title of the God of their 
fathers, — the great " I AM." In the conscious- 
ness of His inner divine nature He proclaims 
Himself the Being of the universe, — not an 
eternal "I am not," but "I AM" — infinite, 
positive life and essence. " I am the Way, the 
Truth, and the Life." " I am the Light of the 
world." " I am the Good Shepherd." " I am 
the Vine." " I am the Bread of Life." " I am 
the Resurrection and the Life." 

Here is a display of positive being ! a certainty 
of character, an absoluteness of goodness and 



GREATNESS IN HUMILITY. 143 

truth, which the world, if it would, cannot shake 
off. And this, too, in One who said, " I am 
meek and lowly in heart." Ah ! what a rebuke 
to our natural judgments ! We admire the man 
who, as we say, has a will of his own ; a man who 
has something of the " Boanerges " about him ; 
who, instead of being meek and lowly, is at times a 
" son of thunder ; " a man who can not only take, 
but give, a powerful blow ; and we pity, perhaps, 
the meek and the lowly, the poor in spirit, and 
the peacemakers, out of a feeling that there is 
in such Christ-like qualities a lack of positiveness 
and strength. But the meek and the lowly One 
stands before us, — stands before us and confounds 
us with His perfect strength. In His gentleness, 
He will take the little children in His arms and 
bless them. In His tenderness, He will try to 
hush the wails of the women as He slowly makes 
His way to the crucifixion. He will pray for His 
executioners as they drive the nails through His 
quivering flesh. "Meek and lowly/'' indeed i But 
there is an unconquerable strength in that meek- 
ness, and an eternal majesty in that lowliness ! 



144 FOOTPRINTS OF THE SAVIOUR. 

From verbal testimony, let us turn to the life 
itself. And the more deeply we look into that 
life, the more clearly shall we see its absolute per- 
fection. Those very years in Nazareth, concern- 
ing which the Gospels tell us so little, proclaim 
His sanctity with silent eloquence. For they tell 
of complete self-abnegation and self-control, such 
as belong only to a nature supremely perfect. 
We have already seen that the Humanity of 
Christ was related to the Divine within Him as 
our earthly nature is related to our inmost nature, 
or soul. Of this relation He was conscious. He 
knew what power was His. He understood His 
mission. He longed to set men spiritually free. 
And yet there is no impatience. He makes no 
display of His divinity. He does not startle the 
people of the village with claims of His omnipo- 
tence. He does not assert His divine superiority 
over them. On the contrary, He accommodates 
Himself to their conditions. The greatest of all 
becomes the servant of all, — a carpenter in their 
little village : building them their homes ; making 
each day a day of lowly service ; living so simply 



"AS ONE THAT SERFETH." 145 

among them, that at the end of thirty years the 
people of the village — those even who had lived 
under the same roof and passed as His kinsmen 
— know Him only as the carpenter. Remember- 
ing always who He was ; remembering that, as He 
said, He was in the Father, and the Father in 
Him, how wonderful are these quiet years of toil ! 
What testimony they furnish to the perfect sanc- 
tity of His nature ! For who but one supremely 
true and holy would be capable of such patience, 
condescension, and self-denial ? 

How plainly this sanctity appears all through 
the Saviour's public ministry ! He is so calm, 
so enduring ! The people's heart was indeed 
waxed gross, and their ears were dull of hearing, 
and their eyes they had closed. Even His apos- 
tles were " slow of heart." And yet He taught 
them so patiently ! He clothed the truth for 
them in the simplest forms, relating to them par- 
ables of the Shepherd and the sheep, of the 
Sower and the seed, of the Yine and the branches. 
His enemies laid snares for Him; the spirits of 
evil assailed Him ; His followers misunderstood 
10 



146 FOOTPRINTS OF THE SAVIOUR. 

Him ; one of them betrayed Him ! Yet still 
He went calmly on; not without pain, but al- 
ways without bitterness. There is no dread, as 
with men, lest His plans shall fail. He knew the 
end, and saw that it was only by the complete 
sacrifice of His Humanity that the work of re- 
demption could be wrought. He strengthened 
His Humanity by bringing it into communion 
with the divine Fatherhood of His nature, saying, 
as none of us have ever said, " Thy will be done ; " 
then went calmly forth, — went forth to spiritual 
conflicts too fearful for us to know; went forth 
to trial and to death. 

His sanctity appears in the gentle dignity with 
which He bore ill-treatment. What so fully 
tests character as self-control under unjust and 
cruel treatment ? What more trying than to 
have one's holiest aims misjudged ; to be accused 
or suspected of wrong where no wrong is ; to 
have good requited by evil? Possessing all 
power in heaven and in earth, He never once 
availed Himself of His omnipotence to punish 
His worst enemies. He never harmed a single 



JUDAS AND TEE MASTER. 147 

creature. Sin was hateful in His eyes, but the 
sinner was an object of His compassion. He 
fairly mourns over Judas. The man's perfidy 
fills Him with anguish. It is on His heart as 
He sits down with the twelve to that last Pass- 
over meal. He might have arraigned His be- 
trayer; He might have exposed his treachery. 
Their hands meet as each dips his morsel of 
bread in the charoselh. "What thou doest, do 
quickly " There is no anger in the words. Soon 
they meet again, and in a spot which, it would 
seem, was hallowed by many tender associations. 
It is an awful moment in the life of Iscariot. 
And how is he met ? The kiss is not refused ; 
but oh, what blow could have caused such pain ! 
" Judas, betrayest thou the Son of Man with a 
kiss ? " Love — wounded, ill-requited love — 
speaking in accents of profound pity while the 
darkness is gathering around them both, still mer- 
ciful, still free of bitterness, held out to the man in 
these parting words of sorrow ! 

" Judas, dost thou betray Me with a kiss ? 
Caust thou find hell about My lips, and miss 
Of life just at the gates of life and bliss ? " 



148 FOOTPRINTS OF THE SAVIOUR. 

We come away from such a scene with the feel- 
ing that one who could bear evil in the spirit in 
which the Saviour bore it was indeed perfect and 
divine. 

One test of a true life the Lord gave to His 
apostles, to which He Himself submitted, — 
" Greater love hath no man than this, that a man 
lay down his life for his friends."" The test in- 
volves more than a willingness to yield up one's 
physical life for the good of others. There is a 
daily laying down of the life — the abasement of 
selfish desires, the subordination of the earthly to 
the heavenly — which requires the highest hero- 
ism. The Lord made self-denial, of which the 
cross is the eternal emblem, a condition of the 
Christian life. " If any man will come after Me, 
let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, 
and follow Me. For whosoever will save his life, 
shall lose it ; and whosoever will lose his life for 
My sake, the same shall save it." 

How fully the Lord fulfilled this law of self- 
sacrifice ! " I lay down My life for the sheep," 
He said. None ever gave his life so willingly, so 



"FOR THEIR SAXES r 149 

universally, as the Son of Man. His very sanc- 
tity He declares to be won for the world's sake. 
" For their sakes I sanctify Myself, that they also 
might be sanctified through the truth." There 
are no words more loving than these. " For 
their sakes ! " Have we thought of the Lord's 
glorification as being for His sake alone ? Then 
we need to correct the thought. It is for our 
sakes ; that He may bring a new power to bear 
on our calloused souls, and sanctify us, raising us 
up from death unto life. Is He tempted ? Ay, 
truly, that overcoming the assaults of evil He 
may be a ready and an all-powerful help when we 
are grappled. Is He mocked, and scourged, and 
crucified ? Oh, we know the truth of it ; and by 
the sufferings borne, and the victories won, He 
comes to champion us to-day in our desperate 
cause. Is He retiring to some lonely mountain 
for the night ? Is He entering the shadows of 
Gethsemane? Is He, faint and bleeding, going 
on to Calvary ? Then, remember He takes the 
path for us, — for us, cold, sluggish, coward- 
men, who read about those struggles, and try to 



150 FOOTPRINTS OF THE SAVIOUR. 

analyze thein, and — God forgive us ! — even 
criticise them, yet will not place our cross upon 
our backs and follow daily in the path He trod ! 

" For their sakes I sanctify Myself." In these 
few words is revealed a truth which we would 
never forget, — that the sanctity of the Saviour 
came, as sanctity must ever come, through self- 
denial and spiritual conflict. We may say with 
reverence that His perfection cost Him days and 
years of struggle ; for it was attained by the dis- 
placement of everything in the Humanity which 
was not in exact correspondence with the Divine 
within. And this was only accomplished through 
a certain self-immolation, which He indicated 
whenever He spoke of laying down His life. 
The work of sanctification went on from day 
to day. There was a daily struggle with every 
least inheritance of that nature, woman-born. 
There was a daily combat with evil powers who 
would fain have beaten through those walls of 
life. There was a sweet and daily laying down 
of His natural life, bringing the Human and 
the Divine into closer and closer conjunction. 



SANCTITY THROUGH SELF-SACRIFICE. 151 

Of this spiritual self-sacrifice, few who saw 
Him could have had any true realization. Not 
even the apostles — those who, He said, had fol- 
lowed Him in the regeneration — understood this 
truth in its fulness. They could hear Him say, 
" The hour is come that the Son of Man should 
be glorified." They could hear His prayer, " And 
now, O Father, glorify Me with Thine own self." 
But did they know the solemn truth conveyed in 
these words ? Did they know that the Humanity 
and the Divinity of their Saviour had been so 
united that the Humanity itself was divine ? 
The power of His life they felt; they were 
drawn towards Him ; the love and truth of His 
divinely-human nature lifted them upon a higher 
plane of life. And this same holy, uplifting in- 
fluence was felt by many others, and has con- 
tinued among Christians ever since. 

In this fact — the sanctifying power of Christ 
— we find our highest proof of His sanctity. 
Something passes into the man who faithfully fol- 
lows the Master, which elevates and enlarges his 
entire manhood. The man moves amid scenes 



152 FOOTPRINTS OF THE SAVIOUR. 

and industries which are common to all; yet 
slowly, quite imperceptibly oftentimes to himself, 
something of calmness, of patience, of strength, 
of mercy, of self-denial, grows up within him, 
and in a sense separates him from the world. 
A new spirit pervades his life; new hopes, new 
motives thrill it. Something, which cannot be 
explained away, purifies and expands it. The 
spirit of the Lord sanctifies it. And by this we 
may know that He Himself is perfect and divine, 
and that His religion is unfailingly true. 

What, in all that we know of life, is more won- 
derful than this experience of salvation ? To be 
reclaimed from the w r orld ; to be turned from sin- 
fulness ; to have the Saviour come to a man's 
heart, and, in the spirit of loving mercy, lay His 
omnipotent hand upon our diseased frames, say- 
ing, " Be thou clean ! " Now, as years ago, vir- 
tue goes out of Him. No wonder the multitudes 
sought to touch Him ! He was so true and holy, 
and they so full of misery ! To the early Chris- 
tians this life was the most real, the most precious 
thing their minds could possess. Why should it 



THE SANCTIFYING POWER OF CHRIST. 153 

be less to us, who are still summoned to follow in 
the footsteps of that life, and to enter heaven 
through that same sacred Door ? Why should it 
be less to us, who are beset with difficulties, and 
assaulted with temptations, and tormented by the 
lusts of the world and the burning of selfishness ? 
Why should it be less to us, who toil, and become 
weary and heavy-laden, and suffer pains of heart 
and of conscience which cast us down, and endure 
losses, and part with our friends and our loved 
ones in death ? 

We are born into the world with souls unsanc- 
tified, and with strong proclivities to evil. Though 
each should think that he, at least, may escape 
experiences which have put the strength and pa- 
tience of others to the test, yet sooner or later he 
lives to see his endurance tried. And as life 
brings out the inherited qualities of his nature, 
he feels more and more keenly the truth of the 
perfect One when he said, "Ye must be born 
again." Cares come, disappointments come, sor- 
rows come; come, too, the temptations which 
show a man the foes in his own breast, and in- 



15 i FOOTPRINTS OF THE SAVIOUR. 

volve liiin in such bitter strifes. And then, with 
some, will come the longing for a Sanctifier, — 
some one to give them the power to make their 
life a truer, sweeter thing than it is ; some one to 
help lift it out of its selfishness. That feeling, 
when it first becomes distinctly felt, marks a crisis 
in our life. It is the brooding spirit of the Lord 
ruffling the face of the deep, putting motion into 
what was still and dead. We may, in our per- 
versity, though sometimes in our ignorance, try 
many human physicians. We may try first this, 
then that scheme of improvement, only to find 
ourselves made nothing better, but rather worse. 
But the time may also come when, in our ex- 
tremity, we shall go in simple faith to Jesus 
Christ ; touch, as it were, with trembling fingers 
His blessed Person ; and in that contact between 
our human and His divine life feel a power which 
heals and sanctifies. 

" For their sakes I sanctify Myself, that they 
also might be sanctified." There is something 
intensely solemn in this fact of Christ's absolute 
perfection. We see so much that is imperfect, so 



"LOOK UNTO ME AND BE YE SAVED." 155 

much that is sinful and weak in human nature, so 
many mistakes and failures. What tears of peni- 
tence ought we to have shed ! "What cries of re- 
morse should have come from our lips ! " God 
be merciful to me a sinner ! " is the heart-cry of 
many a man. And then we turn to the divinely- 
human life of the Son of Man, and find One who 
could go through this world's experiences, beset 
with difficulties and dangers, assailed by evil, 
wronged, scorned, betrayed, a stranger in the 
world, so little understood that as He stood with 
the multitudes about Him He seemed alone, — 
alone in the crowd, alone by the very divineness 
of His life, — work to perform such as no man 
could accomplish, experiences to undergo so deep 
and intense that they would have withered the 
strongest of us, — we find all this, and with it 
this fact, this awful fact, of sinlessness, not one 
least blemish ! and we so easily discouraged, so 
weak in temptation, so faithless and unbelieving. 

Still before the world stands our blessed Lord 
and Saviour. Still His hands are over us in 
benediction. And still men are reaching out their 



156 FOOTPRINTS OF THE SAVIOUR. 

imploring hands to Him, like Jairus praying for 
his child, like Peter sinking amid the waves of 
Galilee, like the leper crying out in his misery, 
" Lord, if Thou wilt, Thou canst make me clean. - " 
He is the world's one sinless figure. He is its 
one perfect life. The world, with its sick and its 
sinful, lies at His feet ; and He says through His 
Word, " Look unto Me and be ye saved, all the 
ends of the earth; for I am God, and there is 
none else." 



THE MAJESTY OF CHRIST. 



i" brought my Lord unto a beetling hill, 

To cast Him down: 
He turned and looked on me — so calm, so still. 

Without a frown — 

2" was overthrown. 

I led against Him men in fierce array, 

Him to enthrall: 
He strove not ; "I am He" I heard Him say: 

They fear, and all 

Before Him fall, 

Alas! I would not own Him for my Lord; 

I Him denied! 
But then I met His gaze; He spoke no word; 

With humbled pride, 

I turned and cried. 

Oh, may I ne'er forget His wondrous grace, 

But ever cling 
To Him, my Lord ; let nought His reign displace, 

But love e'er bring 

To Christ my King! 

a & 

Written for this volume. 



VII. 
€&e S^ajcstp of €fjri£k 

" Art Thou a King then ? " 

" Thou sayest that I am a KingP 

/^HEIST'S entry into Jerusalem is the one 
incident during His ministry wherein He 
seemed to receive the glory due unto His name ; 
the one occasion when He accepted the outward 
honors belonging to a ting. 

It was many a day since Jerusalem had seen 
such sights. The city was crowded with people 
coming from all parts of the country to the 
Passover. They usually travelled in companies, 
chanting the Psalms of David as they went. 
They crowded into the capital by the hundred 
thousand. Private houses became public; tents 
were pitched in the streets and outside the city. 



160 FOOTPRINTS OF THE SAVIOUR. 

The festival was always a stirring one ; but 
this time there was an additional cause of excite- 
ment. The chief priests and Pharisees had given 
a commandment, that if any man knew where 
Christ was, he should show it, that they might 
take Him. And the men, meeting each other in 
the temple courts, or on the streets, or in their 
shops, would ask, " What think ye, that He will 
not come to the feast ? " The city was on the 
qui vive. Should He come, a collision seemed 
inevitable ; for the church authorities were de- 
termined to have Him apprehended, while, on 
the other hand, He was known to have many 
friends among the common people, especially the 
Galileans. 

We may imagine, then, that there was no small 
excitement when the news came that He had left 
Bethany and was actually on His way to the city, 
followed by a large company of friends. The 
people poured out of the city gates by thousands. 
They cross the Kedron, and take the road for 
Bethany. Yes, there they come, down the white, 
dusty road. And there is the Teacher of Naza- 



" BEHOLD, THY KING COMETH UNTO THEE !" 161 

reth, coming, as the rulers and prophets of old 
used to come, riding on an ass, and a colt the 
foal of an ass. The excitement runs high. Some 
carpet the road with their garments ; others cut 
down palm-branches and strew them in the way ; 
while all send up shout after shout of welcome, 
and hail Him as King. 

" Hosanna to the Son of David ! " they cry. 
u Blessed is He that cometh in the name of the 
Lord ! " 

" Blessed be the kingdom of our father David, 
that cometh in the name of the Lord ! " 

" Blessed [they boldly cry] is the King of 
Israel, that cometh in the name of the Lord ! " 

ci Peace in heaven, and glory in the highest ! " 

Down sweeps the procession, through the Ke- 
dron valley, over the brook, then up again to the 
city gate and into the streets of Jerusalem. Where 
are the chief priests and Pharisees now ? Poor, 
baffled men ! they are thoroughly dismayed. 
They see the excited multitudes, and whisper 
angrily to each other, " Behold, the world is gone 
after Him ! " The tide of enthusiasm has rolled 
11 



162 FOOTPRINTS OF THE SAVIOUR. 

from Galilee to Jerusalem. Some of them man- 
age to make their way to the Messiah, and ask 
Him to rebuke His disciples. But He replies, 
" I tell you, that if these should hold their peace, 
the stones would immediately cry out." 

And yet, who does not feel that these royal 
honors were not dear to our blessed Lord ? For, 
after all, were they not the strongest testimony to 
how little the people really understood or cared 
for Him ? What was temporal power or royal 
splendor to Him, w r ho came to lay down His life 
for men's sake ? He was indeed King, as all the 
angels know ; nor did He ever reject the title. 
But His Kingship was much more royal than that 
of any Csesar ; and His kingdom was not of this 
w r orld. 

For once the Seer of Patmos beheld a great 
multitude, which no man could number, of all 
nations and kindreds and people and tongues, 
standing before the throne and before the Lamb, 
clothed with white robes, and palms in their 
hands. And he heard the chant of the angel 
choirs as it came rolling out of the opened heav- 



" WHO IS THIS KING OF GLORY ?" 163 

ens : " Worthy is the Lamb that was slain, to 
receive power, and riches, and wisdom, and 
strength, and honor, and glory, and blessing ! " 
This was royal welcome indeed ! For to those 
purified spirits Christ was King, not of lands or 
earthly principalities, but of their hearts. He 
was their King, because His truth had won them 
quite, and because they were happy in yielding 
their souls to His regnant will. 

But how different was the spirit of it all on 
that day when the Saviour rode into Jerusalem 
amid the hosannas of the multitude ! The peo- 
ple were happy. For the moment they were 
loyal. Why ? Because the Saviour of souls was 
there ? No ! Because, as Luke declares in his 
Gospel, " They thought that the kingdom of God 
would immediately appear." The sudden re- 
establishment of David's throne, in all its old- 
time glory, — that was what they prayed for ; that 
was what they expected. The kind Healer and 
Uplifter of the human heart they had often 
mocked, and would mock again. But let Him 
come as their Messiah, — a monarch who would 



164 FOOTPRINTS OF THE SAVIOUR. 

crash the Roman yoke, which galled their proud 
natures, and they would welcome Him indeed ! 
They would salute Him with palms ! They would 
spread their garments for Him ! They would do 
anything for Him if He would be Csesar's Caesar ! 
But w T hen they found His Kingship meant truth, 
and order, and purity in the heart, it took but 
five days to turn their " Hosannas " into cries of 
" Crucify Him!" 

And so, this entry into Jerusalem teaches us 
two facts concerning the majesty of Christ : 

He had the quality of majesty, otherwise He 
would not have accepted these royal honors ; 

But His majesty was not of a temporal 
character. 

He had the quality of majesty. We feel that 
all through His ministry. We feel it even when 
He is saying, " I am meek and lowly in heart." 
We bow to it w r hen He declares His homeless- 
ness, and says so touchingly, " The Son of Man 
hath not where to lay His head ! " We see it 
when, for one moment, the veil is lifted and He 
stands upon a mount in transfigured glory, his 



HIDDEN ROYALTY. 165 

face shining as the sun and His raiment white 
and glistering. 

We know nothing of the Redeemer's appear- 
ance. "Whether, as some legends would have us 
believe, His appearance was altogether unlovely, 
in exact fulfilment of the prophecy, "He hath 
no form, nor comeliness \ and when we shall see 
Him, there is no beauty that we should desire 
Him ; w or whether His was a majestic, beau- 
teous presence, we know not. We do not need to 
know. But this is not hidden from us, — there was 
a certain power of life, issuing from His person, 
which brought men to their knees time and again. 

We cannot read our Gospels intelligently, if we 
think of Christ only as a loving, docile, patient, 
winning person. Our conception of Him is a 
very weak one, if we leave out a certain spirit of 
power and majesty to which the Gospels testify 
again and again. Under every deed or utterance 
of His there is a reserved, yes, a pent-up force, 
w r hich many felt and many feel. " He taught 
them/' say these precious records, " as one having 
authority, and not as the Scribes/' He legislates 



166 FOOTPRINTS OF THE SAVIOUR. 

beyond Moses and their fathers, with an eternal 
" I say unto you." And the people marvelled. 
Time and again they came to Him, the Gospels 
say, "worshipping/" or " kneeling," or "falling 
at His feet," or " trembling and falling down to 
Him." He, without authority save that of the 
truth, could overturn the tables of the money- 
changers, and send their piles of coin spinning 
over the temple floor; drive out the sheep and 
oxen, and command that the great wicker cages 
full of doves should be taken hence. What won- 
der that the people should whisper to each other, 
" This is certainly the prophet ! " or that some 
should go so far as to ask, " Is not this the 
Christ ? " 

See Him among the hills of Gadara. There is 
up there in some of those tombs which pierce the 
sides of the hill, a demoniac so wild and untamable 
that no one dares pass by that way. The people 
of the district had more than once pursued him, 
and caught him, and chained him, only to see the 
chains plucked asunder, and the fetters broken in 
pieces. But this morning a Galilean fishing-boat 



THE POWER OF CHRIST'S 31 A JE STY. 167 

has come to the shore. The Christ and His dis- 
ciples step out. Instantly this wild, naked, fren- 
zied man comes leaping down the mountain-side. 
But while he is jet quite a distance off, the poor, 
maddened thing falls cowering to the earth, and 
with an awful cry exclaims, " What have I to do 
with thee, Jesus, thou Son of the most high God ? 
Art Thou come hither to torment us before the 
time ? w The devil-legion in an agony of terror 
through His gentle presence ! 

And what devils and satans felt, men felt too. 
The people of Nazareth, at the end of that first 
sermon He preached to them, rose up as one man, 
seized Him, and led Him to the brow of the hill 
whereon their city was built, with the intention of 
casting Him down headlong. But, says the nar- 
rative, " He, passing through the midst of them, 
went His way." In the bearing of the Son of 
Man there must have been something so calm, so 
pure, so true, that the angry men were awed by 
it, lost their brutal courage, let go their hold, fell 
back, and let Him pass unhurt in His simple 
majesty through their broken ranks ! 



168 FOOTPRINTS OF THE SAVIOUR. 

We see almost the same thing in Gethsemane. 
Why should the mob be afraid of Jesus of Naza- 
reth? They are armed with clubs and staves 
and all manner of weapons : He has but a few 
men about Him. Why, then, should they recoil 
and fall to the ground when He advances to meet 
them, and simply says " I am He " ? With a 
calmness and pureness and holy dignity, which 
smote their coward consciences as not even a 
flaming angel could have done, He stood there in 
His simple majesty, and they dare not face Him ! 
Will any merely natural reasons suffice for these 
things ? Do they not tell of divine majesty and 
power ? 

Now, we have the secret of it all in that memo- 
rable interview between Christ and the Roman 
governor. Pilate, according to contemporary his- 
tory, was an arbitrary, tyrannical ruler; by no 
means adverse to the shedding of blood, and none 
too scrupulous in the exercise of his authority, — 
not at all the man to be awed by the quiet pres- 
ence and a few calm words of a prisoner. Yet 
the world knows how anxious he grew. We feel 



BEFORE PILATE. 169 

that it is Pilate's trial; that the bound One is 
King, and the governor the subject. " Art Thou 
a King ? " Pilate asks. No doubt there was con- 
tempt, humor, almost pity in the question ; and 
so far from being serious, Pilate's thought was 
more, " Are you, bound, friendless, weary, sweet- 
minded man, a king ? Have you a kingdom ? 
Have you subjects ? " And what we cannot for- 
get is, that Christ affirmed His Kingship to this 
Roman, and told him the secret of His majesty 
in words which the world is just beginning to 
understand. 

He was addressing an officer of that nation 
which was the splendid tyrant of the world, and 
the symbols of its idolatry and of its wealth were 
flashing out upon Him. Yet He turned to the 
man and said : " Thou sayest that I am a king 
[a form of assent] . To this end was I born, and 
for this cause came I into the world, that I should 
bear witness unto the Truth/' Pilate, it is true, 
could not follow Him in this train of thought, 
because he did not know what the truth was. 
To him, it was the most unreal thing imaginable. 



170 FOOTPRINTS OF THE SAVIOUR. 

He was thinking of the truth as something which 
the scholars of his day were vainly guessing after. 
What, then, could he think of One who rested His 
claims of royalty on being the living witness to 
the truth ? 

Let us not pass lightly over these words of the 
Christ. There have been good men, and wise 
men; there have been those whom we, in our 
enthusiasm, have called true men, — men who 
were faithful to a principle higher than themselves. 
But there has been but One who could or ever 
did say, "I am the Truth ; " only One who could 
identify Himself with that infinite order and wis- 
dom which guides all things. Think of it ! He, 
in His Humanity, the perfect embodiment of 
Truth, — that which, to our little intelligences, 
seems so boundless, so unfathomable, so grand, so 
all-conquering. He, the Son of Man, the spent 
and weary One, the Truth, — the Word made flesh ! 
What though Pilate spoke for an empire whose 
savage power would crush Him, unresisting, as a 
man would crush a flower ! Did ever man " drest 
in a little brief authority," seem more insignifi- 



THE KING OF KINGS. 171 

cant, as, troubled and baffled by his gentle pris- 
oner, he broke out angrily, u Speakest Thou not 
unto me ? Knowest Thou not that I have power 
to crucify Thee, and have power to release Thee ? " 
Do these bragging words deceive us ? Do we 
not see that if Christ is the Truth, if He did in- 
corporate into His Humanity everything of that 
order and wisdom we pretend to reverence, that 
then, however shamefully men abuse Him, how- 
ever loudly they hoot at Him, however tightly 
they nail Him, He, the silent, the suffering One, 
has yet a majesty all His own, and is forever 
" King of kings and Lord of lords " ? 

And this, too, notwithstanding He stands there 
clothed in our form and nature. Yet here is 
where many stumble. They cannot but associate 
weakness and sin with human nature. A Hu- 
manity which is perfect and divine, and therefore 
omnipotent, is to them impossible. This is no 
new perplexity. In the early days of the Christian 
Church some were led to deny the reality of the 
incarnation on this very ground. 1 To them, the 

1 See Note D. 



172 FOOTPRINTS OF THE SAVIOUR. 

assumption of Humanity was, in a certain way, 
degrading to the Divine Essence. But, as has 
been pointed out, the most spiritual of the apos- 
tles was the most strenuous in demanding faith in 
what we must call the materialism of Christ's 
Humanity. " That which we have heard, which we 
have seen with our eyes, which we have looked 
upon, and our hands have handled of the Word 
of Life, declare we unto you." John will have 
nothing less. " Every spirit that confesseth not 
that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh, is not 
of God ; and this is that spirit of Antichrist, 
whereof ye have heard that it should come." 
Here, then, apparently, are two things to be 
reconciled : 

Christ was human ; 

Christ was divine. 

One fact is put just as strongly as the other. 
Weariness, temptation, suffering, — these, certainly, 
are emphasized; yet not more so than absolute 
siulessness, perfection, and an infinitude of love, 
wisdom, and power such as do not belong to mor- 
tal man. Are the two facts irreconcilable ? Not 



CHRIST'S HUMANITY MADE DIVINE. 173 

if we accept Christ's declaration that His Hu- 
manity became glorified, that is, made divine. 
" Now is the Son of Man glorified ; and God is 
glorified in Him. If God be glorified in Him, 
God shall also glorify Him in Himself and shall 
straightway glorify Him/'' Tims " He glorified 
His Humanity by uniting it with the Divinity of 
which it was begotten. " He did not take a Hu- 
manity merely to live in it for a short time, and 
at the end of that time cast it aside and be no 
more to man than He was before. The Human- 
ity was assumed, that by means of the indwelling 
Divinity it (the Humanity) might be glorified 
with a divine glory and be made divine. For if 
the Humanity always remained frail and imperfect 
as at birth, the Jews had a measure of right in 
challenging His divine claims. If He, a finite 
though pure man, took upon Himself the divine 
prerogative of forgiving sin, was their indignation 
so culpable ? If He was not really and abso- 
lutely divine, was it so strange that they were 
angered by His extraordinary claims, and resisted 
Him to the death ? 



174 FOOTPRINTS OF THE SAVIOUR. 

" If I had not come/' He said, " and spoken 
unto them, they had not had sin ; but now they 
have no cloak for their sin/' And He also said, 
" If I had not done among them the works which 
none other man did, they had not had sin; but 
now they have both seen and hated both Me and 
My Father, " — that is, both the Humanity and 
the Divinity. 

" I and my Father are one/' He said to them 
one day. How did they answer Him? They 
took up stones to stone Him for blasphemy. 
But He stopped them and said ; " Many good 
works have I shown you; for which of those 
works do ye stone Me?" And they answered 
angrily, "For a good work we stone Thee not; 
but for blasphemy; and [mark the words] be- 
cause that Thou, being a man, makest Thyself 
God." " Because that Thou, being a man, mak- 
est Thyself God!" That was the issue. That 
is the issue now ; and God pity us if we are still 
on the side of His enemies, who stood confronting 
Him with stones in their hands ! 

" Behold the Man ! " He Himself exclaimed as 



'ECCE HOMO!" 175 



He, wounded and condemned, came forth to the 
chief priests and officers. Our Gospels take away 
much of the force of this memorable exclamation 
by putting it into the mouth of Pilate. But 
Pilate's name, being in italics, is an insertion of 
the translators ; and the passage should really 
read : " Then came Jesus forth, wearing the 
crown of thorns, and the purple robe ; and saitli 
unto them, ' Behold the Man ! ' " The words are 
Christ's. He presents Himself as the perfect, 
the universal, the Divine Man. "We do not forget 
that He came fresh from the scourging, and that 
His visage must have been marred indeed. We 
do not forget that He came out wearing "the sad 
finery " with which the soldiers had decked Him. 
No doubt they were still laughing over their cruel 
sport, and pointing their guilty fingers at the 
thorn-crowned King. But He stood there calm 
and gentle amid that storm of ridicule and hate ; 
stood there and made one exclamation to them, — 
nay, to the universe of worlds, — "ISe 6 av0pco- 
tto?! ("Behold the Man!") The man, — not 
a man, — the one, perfect, God-Man ! Bereft of 



176 FOOTPRINTS OF THE SAVIOUR. 

friends, scourged, ridiculed, condemned, but still 
the Man! 

There was but one answer to this exclamation 
of the crowned Messiah. It was full of hate. 
" Crucify Hirn ! " cried the chief priests and offi- 
cers, — " Crucify Him ! " Nothing shall save Him 
now, — not even the timid remonstrance of Pilate, 
" Shall I crucify your King ? " It was because 
He would not be the king they secretly longed 
for, and because His kingdom was not of this 
world, that they took Him away and crucified 
Him. 1 Had He been a king to lead them forth 
against their enemies, as in the days of old, they 
would have drawn their swords for Him. Be- 
cause His kingship was spiritual, they were well 
content to see Him pierced. And they only be- 
trayed themselves when they came and complained 
to Pilate, " Write not, < The King of the Jews ; ' 
but that He said, c I am King of the Jews/ n 

It was indeed as the Lord said : they knew not 
what they were doing. They saw no majesty in 
the Prince of Peace. But the time came when 
1 See Note E. 



AM LB THE GOLDEN LAMPS. 177 

the Lord, in a divinely spiritual body, ascended 
into heaven. And there His Humanity shines 
eternally. In the city of God, the Lamb is the 
Light thereof. When the scenery of the Isle of 
Patmos melted away before John in his banish- 
ment, and the landscapes of the spirit-world came 
floating before his inner senses, he looked, and 
lo ! among the heavenly lights, walking amid the 
golden lamps, was " One like unto the Son of 
Man." No longer despised and rejected, the 
crucified One shone in His eternal majesty. " His 
head and His hairs were white like wool, as white 
as snow; and His eyes were as a flame of fire; 
and His feet like unto fine brass, as if they burned 
in a furnace. . . . And His countenance was as 
the sun shineth in his strength." 

A vision sublime, almost awful in its glory, 
so that John fell in deadly fear at His feet. And 
yet the central light of those golden lamps was 
like unto the Son of Man. John feels that he 
is lying at his Master's feet; only the material 
coverings have been burned away, and the 
Humanity of his Saviour shines out in divine 
12 



178 FOOTPRINTS OF THE SAVIOUR. 

majesty and glory. The Son of Man, no longer 
spent and weary, as when John followed Him 
amid the hills of Palestine, but "clothed with 
light inaccessible, girt with omnipotence and 
love ! " Worshipped by the heavenly hosts, 
yet still revealing Himself as the Son of Man, 
— God in Humanity ; God manifest in Jesus 
Christ. 

"Thou art my King, — 
My King henceforth, alone ; 
And I, thy servant, Lord, am all Thine own. 
Give me Thy strength; oh, let Thy dwelling be 
In this poor heart that pants, my Lord, for Thee ! " 



THE SACRIFICE OF CHRIST. 



'When my love for Christ groivs iceak, 
When for stronger faith I seek, 
Hill of Calvary, I go 
To thy scenes of fear and woe: 
Then to life I turn again. 
Learning all the worth of pain, 
Learning all the might that lies 
Ln a full self-sacrifice" 



Helps by the Way. 



VIII. 
€&e Sacrifice of €t}ti$t 

" / lay down My life, that I miglit take it again. 
No man taketh it from Me, but I lay it down of 
Myself. 1 have power to lay it down, and I have 
power to take it again" 



" TTE saved others. Himself He cannot save ! " 
Such was the cruel taunt of Christ's per- 
secutors. The cross with its sacred burden had 
been raised, and fallen into its socket ; the male- 
factors had entered upon their agony, and were 
on either side of Him ; and when the chief jjriests 
and the scribes and the elders saw Him, as they 
believed, conquered, — saw Him really nailed to 
the cross, all helpless against their indignities, 
held there by the iron nails, powerless, friendless, 



182 FOOTPRINTS OF THE SAVIOUR. 

their prisoner, their victim, — they gave vent to 
what was doubtless a shout of relief. 

For always men try to bolster themselves in 
their weakest part. So, when the crisis came, 
and they found they had nothing to fear ; when 
they found He did not baffle or escape them by 
superhuman power; then this fear, which had 
been lying on their consciences, betrayed itself 
in that exultant cry, "He saved others, Himself 
He cannot save ! " 

And the thieves on either side of Him, with 
their nerves stretched in pain, and desperate in 
their agony, — they, too, turned on Him ; and one 
of them reviled Him, and took up the taunt that 
kept swelling up to that central cross, and said, 
" If Thou be Christ, save Thyself and us/' And 
the disciples stood apart, watching the sad scene 
despairing; and the women were weeping; and 
the people were mocking and wagging their 
heads; and the despised and the rejected One 
bore all in love and patience, and let the taunt 
go unanswered, — let it go down the ages un- 
reproved and uncontradicted, — for it carried a 



VICTORY BY SACRIFICE. 183 

truth, the truth which He came to establish, the 
truth of self-sacrifice. " He saved others, Him- 
self He cannot save ! " 

Those who mocked, meant, of course, that He 
was helpless; that, like Samson for instance, 
He had proved weak at last, and that there was 
now no power on earth or in heaven which could 
come and snatch Him from His place. How 
false this was He had already shown : once to 
Peter, when He said at His arrest, "Thinkest 
thou I cannot now pray to My Father, and He 
shall presently give Me more than twelve legions 
of angels?" And once to Pilate, when He 
asserted His kingly strength with such gentle 
dignity : " My kingdom is not of this world ; if 
My kingdom were of this world, then would My 
servants fight that I should not be delivered to 
the Jews; but now is My kingdom not from 
hence." 

The meaning of the mob was false, but the 
words were true. He who had come to save 
others, nay, He who had saved others, must 
Himself perish; for their salvation was through 



184 FOOTPRINTS OF THE SAVIOUR. 

His self-sacrifice. "Greater love hath no man 
than this, that a man lay down his life for his 
friends." He, the very Truth itself, could not 
do less than fulfil His own words. "Whosoever 
shall seek to save his life shall lose it ; and who- 
soever shall lose his life shall preserve it." " I 
lay down my life," He said, — and there are no 
words more impressive, — "I lay down my life 
that I may take it again. No man taketh it 
from Me, but I lay it down of Myself. I have 
power to lay it down, and I have power to take 
it again." 

Now, we may often have wondered why Christ's 
death was a necessity. Why should He to whom 
we all look as in some sense divine, suffer a 
death so shameful as to be " reckoned among the 
transgressors " ? Why should He be maligned, 
and scourged, and spit upon, and nailed to a 
cross, — He who spake as never man spake ; He 
whom no one could convince of sin; who only 
did good ? 

Questions like these bring us face to face 
with one of the most solemn truths of the 



THE TOUCHSTONE OF THEOLOGY. 185 

Christian religion. The sacrifice of Christ is 
the touchstone of theology. Especially does it 
test our belief in two primal facts of our common 
faith : the Divinity of Christ, and the Unity of 
God. In a word, our conception of the sacrifice 
of Christ will determine both by name and by 
quality the form of our Christianity. 

It is not a mere point of doctrine that we seek 
to raise. For ourselves and for our friends it 
is the living, rather than the theological, Christ 
that is needed. But how shall we follow Christ 
unless we know Him ? and how shall we know 
Him unless we study Him, and try to understand 
His nature, and the purpose of His life and of 
His death ? Christ as a name will not seriously 
affect us. Christ as a sentiment only, will not 
always hold us. Let us, indeed, seek the living 
Christ. Let us not think that we have Him, 
when it is only a theological image of Him we 
are embracing ; but let us at least know Him 
when we find Him. Let us enter into the mean- 
ing and spirit of His redemption and of His 
sacrifice. 



186 FOOTPRINTS OF THE SAVIOUR. 

Now, we have this to encourage us, — that there 
are two facts which all Christians may hold in 
common ; namely, that man, in his slavery to evil, 
needed to be redeemed, and that Christ accom- 
plished that redemption. 

Expanding these two facts, we can. say that 
by sin man had separated himself from God, — 
separated himself by such a distance that he was 
in danger of losing his spiritual life and nature ; 
and on the other hand, that Christ by His life 
and death brought man into restored relations 
with God. So far as we know, every Christian 
denomination would agree to these statements. 
"Further than those two essentials of the doc- 
trine of atonement," declares a writer, " the ac- 
knowledgment of its necessity, and the belief in 
its virtual accomplishment in Christ, no systematic 
statement of the doctrine can be found in the 
early ages of the Christian Church." 

Think of the days in which the Saviour came. 
Imagine the greater part of the civilized world 
to be under the most frightful despotism. Civil 
freedom is unknown. Each man lives in dread 



A LOST WORLD: A BLESSED SAVIOUR. 187 

of the possible treachery of his neighbor. Society 
is diseased at the roots. Chastity and honor are 
openly ridiculed. Religion has either dwindled 
into the merest superstition, or hardened to a rigid 
formalism. And then if we could draw aside the 
veil, we would see the hosts of the infernal world 
crouching behind all these abuses and ready in 
an instant more to quite destroy humanity. 

Who, now, can redeem this world ? "Who can 
make so much as an impression on it? Who 
can convince men of their sins ? Who can shame 
them of their lusts ? Who, in the midst of such 
spiritual blindness and unbelief, can restore men 
to a life of faith ? Another Socrates ? A soldier- 
hero, to raise the cry of u Eef orm ! " amid the 
streets of Rome, and, if need be, enforce it at 
the point of the sword ? 

But the Saviour that did come ! This simple, 
gentle Being, walking unattended to John's bap- 
tism ! This plain, unknown Teacher from despised 
Nazareth ! This " carpenter/' as the people rated 
Him ! This " man of sorrows " ! This " Lamb 
of God"! 



188 FOOTPRINTS OF THE SAVIOUR. 

When Abraham climbed the sides of Mount 
Moriah, torch in hand, conducting his son to 
what he supposed would be his death, the lad, 
bearing the wood for his own pyre, asked in his 
child's simplicity, " My father, behold the fire 
and the wood, but where is the lamb for a burnt- 
offering ? " And the father of his people an- 
swered, "My son, God will provide Himself a 
lamb for a burnt-offering." And God did indeed 
provide Himself a lamb. For when He bowed 
the heavens and came to earth, He provided 
Himself a Humanity ; and this Humanity, which 
He sanctified and made divine, was the true 
" Lamb of God." In every respect the Human- 
ity of our Lord answers to this figure. That it 
was sinless, loving, " meek and lowly in heart," 
we all believe. 

And how did this " Lamb " take away the sin 
of the world ? The expression " take away " is 
translated " beareth " in the margin of our Gos- 
pels. " Behold the Lamb of God which beareth 
the sin of the world." Was it not by bearing, 
that sin could alone be taken away ? This does 



THE BURDEN OF TEE LAMB. 189 

not mean that Christ, according to any conception 
of Him, abolished sin, — for is it not with us 
still ? But He did bear it. In the language of 
prophecy, He did bear our grief s, and carry our 
sorrows, that by bearing and overcoming them 
in Himself, He, drawing personally nearer to us, 
might help us to bear and overcome. 

How little the people about Him understood 
what He was doing. To many, " He had no 
form or comeliness that they should desire Him." 
And so they nailed Him to a cross, and mocked 
Him. And teachers have said that by this death 
God was reconciled to the world ; when yet the 
apostle says that " God was in Christ, reconciling 
the world to Himself." 

And then, too, what is the idea of sacrifice ? 
Must we go back to the time when altars 
reeked with blood, and believe that the slaying 
of an animal or of a human being is pleasing 
to God, or accepted as a propitiation for sin ? 
"Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of 
rams, or with ten thousands of rivers of oil ? " 
Was Christ's sacrifice of this nature? 



190 FOOTPRINTS OF THE SAVIOUR. 

The Hebrew ordinances were, as the apostle 
describes them, "shadows of heavenly things." 
They all refer to Christ, — not, however, in the 
sense that they were to be literally reproduced in 
Him, but spiritually fulfilled. Take this very 
law of the sacrifice. What does sacrifice mean? 
Killing? Not at all. The slaying of the ani- 
mal was only the symbol of the spiritual truth 
back of the sacrifice. And what is that ? The 
word " sacrifice " means, to make holy. That 
which is set apart, and devoted to God; that 
which is made pure and holy to Him, is true 
sacrifice. "The sacrifices of God are a broken 
spirit; a broken and a contrite heart, God, 
Thou wilt not despise." " I beseech you, breth- 
ren," cries the apostle, " by the mercies of God, 
that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, 
holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reason- 
able service." This is not a plea for death, 
but for life, — a holy, consecrated life, wherein 
the body is day by day offered to God a true 
sacrifice. 

To represent this spiritual consecration, the 



SACRIFICE THROUGH CONSECRATION. 191 

Jews, who must needs have a literal,, material 
basis for everything of religion, offered up certain 
animals upon their altars; for by this means 
they were literally set apart to God. And the 
Saviour was a sacrifice ; for He declared that He 
sanctified Himself. He made His Humanity — 
that u Lamb " which bore the sins of the world 
— pure, holy, and divine. And in doing this 
He endured suffering, temptation, and even death. 
It was a daily sacrifice ; the daily putting down 
of everything that was earth-born in subjection 
to the Divine within. So the Humanity became 
divine, — a living sacrifice. The death of Christ 
was only a part, or, rather, the solemn culmi- 
nation of that work of sanctification which had 
been going on silently by day and by night for 
years. As such it was a necessity. 

And in this idea of sacrifice is there not some- 
thing that appeals to our deepest feelings and 
experiences ? It is not always the man who 
marches bravely to physical death, who makes 
the greatest sacrifice. It is one thing for one 
to die with the eyes of the world upon him, and 



192 FOOTPRINTS OF THE SAVIOUR. 

their cheers quickening him, and the struggle of 
kindred souls firing him to a courage which 
rushes openly upon death. It is another thing 
to struggle and die alone : to sacrifice time, 
pleasure, glory even, for ends which others look 
coldly on, or do not so much as understand; to 
sacrifice self, with all that that implies of self- 
abnegation, the patient endurance of sorrow and 
disappointment, the struggle and the victory over 
temptation, — in a word, the laying down little 
by little of the selfish, carnal life for the sake of 
the heavenly, the eternal life. 

There have been souls who have lived and died 
for others; self-denying souls, who found their 
highest happiness in serving others ; calm, trust- 
ful souls, who learned to bear the heaviest load 
for the Master's sake; true, heroic souls, who 
endured that highest martyrdom which any can 
undergo, — persecution for righteousness' sake. 
Many a home in our land contains sacrifices of 
this kind. And they are always sacred, though 
only God should see the sacrifice. And does the 
truth lose any of its force if we apply it to the 



THE DIVINE HUMANITY AS A 3IEDIUM. 193 

Saviour? He did infinitely what we can only 
do finitely. He, the Good Shepherd, did indeed 
lay down His life for the sheep. 

But it may be said : Granting that sacrifice 
does mean to make sacred or holy, and that 
Christ, because He sanctified His Humanity by 
suffering, temptation, and death, was a true sacri- 
fice, how did that avail in the restoration of 
man ? The answer is, by uniting God and man 
through this Humanity as a medium, reconciling, 
or bringing them at-one-ment. 

And this the Humanity of Christ is constantly 
doing. There is a high and holy life above us ; 
there are ideals of greatness, purity, and devotion 
which seem always beyond us ; there are the 
heavens, and the angels in those heavens, and 
the Father of that holy household, who keeps 
saying, " Be ye perfect, as your Father in heaven 
is perfect," — this on the one side of our nature, 
the side which has its windows towards God, and 
sees, as in a vision, the possibilities of a conse- 
crated life ; the peace, and glory, and ecstasy of 
those who become sanctified in the Lord, — and 
13 



194 FOOTPRINTS OF THE SAVIOUR. 

on the other, the greed, the lust, the cruelties and 
wrongs, the daily deceptions and snares, which 
seem to cut off heaven bv infinite distances, and 
leave as in our own gross darkness. 

It is not necessary to think of divine wrath as 
standing over against this moral baseness of the 
world. It is not necessary to think of Christ 
as a separate person from God, trying by means 
of prayers and the sight of His wounds to inter- 
cept the divine judgments; trying to make the 
Infinite One more merciful than He is, as though 
He had not a heart to pity the sins and miseries 
of a groaning world ! Nowhere in the Scriptures 
shall we find that such a mediation is necessary. 
John in his old age looked with open vision upon 
the bright scenery of heaven. He saw no mon- 
arch sitting on a throne, with lowering brow; 
nothing to tell of divine wrath; but, as if to 
prove to him the constancy and tenderness of the 
divine love, though wounded by men's denials 
and sins, he saw in the very midst of the throne, 
— what ? The stern Deity of our theologies ? 
"No ! He saw in the midst of that throne " A 



NEW CALVARIES. 195 

Lamb as it had been slain ; " as if, says one, 
" there was a Calvary not in Palestine alone, 
but away in the heart of God, where we crucify 
Him by our disobedience every day." 

What we need, then, is not an intercessor, in 
the sense that God needs interceding, and as if, 
unless some one step in between us and the 
divine Judge, our cause is lost. What we do 
need, and what we have, is a medium, a channel 
between the infinite perfections of God and the 
vileness of man, such as will transmit the life 
of the former into the weakness and sicknesses of 
the latter; that God and man may not dwell 
apart, but be brought at one : man lifted up by 
repentance, to abide in the wisdom and love of 
the Lord ; the Lord, living in the cleansed heart 
of the man. " And I [the Lord said] , if I be 
lifted up, will draw all men unto Me." That 
was the true atonement, — the Lord glorifying His 
Humanity with the very divine love or father- 
hood of His nature, and then raising men up 
into conjunction with Himself. 



196 FOOTPRINTS OF THE SAVIOUR. 

To this end He took upon Himself a nature 
like our own, — a nature which gave Him every 
appearance of being simply a man among men, 
but which was in direct communication with the 
Divine within. On the side of Humanity, it 
could touch men at their lowest; on the side 
of Divinity, it could be one with the infinite 
Jehovah. 

Here, then, is no confusion of persons, but 
one infinite person clothed with our humanity, 
and making that Humanity a perfect medium 
for transmitting to men — poor, sinful, struggling 
men — such forms of the divine love and wisdom 
as they can receive. €< Come unto Me ! " the 
Saviour cried. We go to Him in His Divine 
Humanity, and lo ! we find that everything of 
comfort or strength the weary soul can ask, 
comes from Him ; comes, if we may so say, 
from some of His infinite experiences; comes 
from that perfect glorified Humanity in tides of 
sympathetic love and power. One such experi- 
ence, and we shall be able to bear and answer 



THE WORLD'S PERFECT SACRIFICE. 197 

His question : " Believest thou not that I am 
in my Father, and my Father in Me ? * J 

And how beautiful it is to look back to those 
hallowed years when our Saviour trod the earth, 
and know that back of that outward ministry, 
which, it would seem, must at times touch the 
hardest of us, this invisible work of sanctification 
was going on, — going on and never ceasing, — 
and a perfect medium, the Divine Humanity, 
was being prepared and provided for the comfort, 
ay, for the salvation of millions upon millions 
of troubled, tempted souls ! 

He had no place, the Gospels say, where to 
lay His head. With a love for the salvation of 
the whole world, He found but few to understand 
Him. Yet daily, hourly, He was living for them 
and laying down the life of His Humanity, that 
by sanctification He might be the world's perfect 
sacrifice. Persecution and crucifixion came ; and 
He who had borne our griefs and carried our 
sorrows was jeered at ; and the multitude hailed 
His approaching death with one exultant cry : 



198 FOOTPRINTS OF THE SAVIOUR. 

" He saved others, Himself He cannot save ! 
The sacrifice was complete. 

"Jesu, meek and lowly, 
Saviour, pure and holy, 
On Thy love relying, 
Hear me humbly crying. 

" Prince of life and power, 
My salvation's tower, 
On the cross I view Thee, 
Calling sinners to Thee. 

" There behold me gazing 
At the sight amazing; 
Bending low before Thee, 
Helpless I adore Thee. 

''Fount of love unceasing, 
"Whence is every blessing, 
All my aching sadness, 
Turn Thou into gladness. 

"Lord, in mercy guide me, 
Be Thou e'er beside me : 
In Thy ways direct me, 
'Neath Thy wings protect me." 



THE ETEENAL PEESENCE OF CHEIST. 



What though I take to me the wide 
Wings of the morning and forth fly, 
Faster He goes, whose care on high 

Shepherds the stars and doth them guide. 

What though the tents foregone, I roam 

Till day wax dim lamenting me; 

He wills that I shall sleep to see 
The great gold stairs to His sweet home. 

What though the press I pass before, 
And climb the branch, He lifts His face ; 
I am not secret from His grace 

Lost in the leafy sycamore* 

What though denied with murmuring deep 
I shame my Lord, — it shall not be ; 
For He will turn and look on me, 

Then must L think thereon and weep. 

The nether depth, the heights above, 
Nor alleys pleach' 'd of Paradise, 
Nor Herod's judgment-halls suffice : 

Man shall not hide himself from love. 

Holy Songs, Carols, and Sacred Ballads. 



IX. 



€&e €ternal $regence of €&rigt. 

" And lo ! I am with you alway" 
* 

T^pORTY days had elapsed since the great Day 
of Resurrection. While the story was be- 
ing circulated that the disciples had come by 
night and stolen away their Master as He slept 
in the tomb, He in His resurrection body was 
coming and going among His believers, and rais- 
ing their thoughts and affections to a distinctly 
higher plane than they had yet attained. 

But at the end of the forty days, being once 
more with the apostles, He lifted up His hands 
and blessed them; and as He blessed them He 
was parted from them, and, in the simple lan- 
guage of the Gospels, was carried up into heaven. 



202 FOOTPRINTS OF THE SAVIOUR. 

And the apostles, we read, "worshipped Him, 
and returned to Jerusalem with great joy." Once 
His outward withdrawal had smitten them with 
a feeling of utter loneliness. But now the sor- 
row and fear had been overcome. They could 
better understand how the separation would only 
be in appearance, and that really and essentially 
He would remain within the sphere of their life, 
and be ever with them to support them in all 
their coming struggles. " I will see you again," 
He had promised them, " and your hearts shall 
rejoice, and your joy no man taketh from you." 
" I go away and come again unto you." " I 
will not leave you comfortless; I will come to 
you." With such promises in their hearts they 
could not think that He was leaving them. 

And so when they saw Him enter the cloud, 
it was not dismay, nor even sorrow, that affected 
them, but joy. The conflicts were over. The 
world had been set free. The Son of Man had 
accomplished the work He came to do. Past 
were the pains, the toil, the weariness, which 
the flesh had endured; past, too, the tempta- 



NEED OF THE COMFORTER. 203 

tion struggles in which the humanity had long 
engaged. Man had seen Him, heard Him, dwelt 
with Him. All that could be done by the con- 
tact of His Humanity with man's life had been 
accomplished. Yet the world still needed Him ; 
and it needed Him most in that hidden power 
to uplift and save which comes in fulness from 
His Divine Humanity. And this is what He 
meant when He said to the disciples, " I tell you 
the truth : It is expedient for you that I go 
away : for if I go not away, the Comforter will 
not come unto you , but if I depart, I will send 
Him unto you." They were holding Him in 
their merely natural thoughts ; He was preparing 
them to receive Him into their spiritual thoughts. 
He would ascend, but not separate Himself from 
them. Therefore He said to them, "Lo, I am 
with you alway/' 

Without that promise, they could not have 
fulfilled their mission as they did. For theirs 
was no easy task : to preach the Crucified as the 
very hope and strength of the soul, and to say 
to the hard and cruel masses that He whom they 



204 FOOTPRINTS OF THE SAVIOUR. 

had scorned and put to death had ascended into 
heaven with power and great glory. These men, 
we must remember, were of a humble class. 
Most of them had, so to speak, just stepped out 
of their fishing-boats. The Lord Himself said 
they were "slow of heart." Apparently they were 
men of hard sense; they were severely literal; 
and it was no easy matter for them to understand 
Him or His teachings. Yet these unlettered men 
were to stand up before the sceptics, the cynics, 
the scholars of the day, and espouse a cause which 
not even the silvery eloquence of a Demosthenes 
could have made to prevail, without the Spirit of 
truth and the indwelling presence of the Lord. 

Moreover, they must have known that their 
apostleship involved them in danger, persecution, 
and death. "They shall put you out of their 
synagogues," the Saviour said; "yea, the time 
cometh, that whosoever killeth you, will think 
that he doeth God service." " When thou shalt 
be old," He said to Simon Peter, " thou shalt 
stretch forth thine hands, and another shall gird 
thee, and carry thee whither thou wouldest not. 



SIGNED WITH THE CROSS. 205 

This spake He, signifying by what death He 
should glorify God/' He was signing the man 
with the cross. It was to be a thrilling expe- 
rience, this preaching of Jesus of Nazareth ; and 
nothing save a belief in His eternal presence 
could have made the first Christian apostleship 
that devoted service which compels our admira- 
tion. But if the disciples spoke and worked 
from minds made sensitive by the breathings of 
the Holy Ghost; if they lived in the faith that 
the Lord was with them according to His promise, 
"I will not leave you comfortless, I will come 
to you," — then they had sources of power and 
courage sufficient for all their needs. 

"When, on the day of Pentecost, Simon Peter 
arose and preached the resurrection and saving 
power of the Crucified with such unction that 
three thousand souls were enrolled by baptism, 
he spoke with lips which had been touched by 
coals of fire from the altar of God. When he 
arose, many were jeering and accusing the apostles 
of drunkenness. But as the sermon went on 
the jeers grew fainter; and soon the men were 



206 FOOTPRINTS OF THE SAVIOUR. 

crying out, " What shall we do ? " And Peter 
said, " Repent, and be baptized, every one of you, 
in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of 
sins, and ye shall receive the gift of the Holy 
Ghost." Surely, the Holy Spirit which filled 
the multitude on that day, and which has filled 
all true disciples ever since, was the spirit of the 
Lord Himself, then given in fulness, because His 
glorification was complete. 

The work went on. But the priests and Sad- 
ducees, becoming maddened by this revival of 
the religion of Jesus, caused Peter and John to 
be cast into prison. The day following, they 
were brought before the Jewish rulers. There 
sat Annas the high priest, and Caiaphas, before 
whom another Prisoner had once stood bound, 
charged with blasphemy. "By what power, or 
by what name have ye done this?" they de- 
manded. The time was when one of those pris- 
oners had denied His Master with a curse, and 
fled from the high priest's palace in shame and 
dismay. But now he faced these hard judges 
without fear, being filled, says the narrative, with 



FACING CHRIST'S JUDGES. 207 

the Holy Ghost, and in a few stirring sentences 
drove their sin home. And they, "when they 
saw the boldness of Peter and John, and perceived 
that they were unlearned and ignorant men, mar- 
velled." " Unlearned and ignorant " save in 
that knowledge which had been hid from the 
wise and prudent ; and weak, but for the divine 
strength which supported their honest hearts. 

These incidents will suffice. They tell of the 
presence of the Redeemer in the hearts of His 
apostles, and the fulfilment of His promise, " Lo, 
I am with you alway." Sore beset with difficul- 
ties, enduring privation and danger, they carried 
on their mission in this supreme trust, that by 
night or by day, in storm or in calm, the spirit 
of their Lord was flowing out to them in streams 
of strength and consolation. Nor was this new 
influx of power confined to a few, but soon be- 
came "one of the divine signatures of Chris- 
tianity generally, found all through the second 
century, and always in connection with and 
within the circle of Christian ideas and Christian 



208 FOOTPRINTS OF THE SAVIOUR. 

But we cannot stop with the second, nor even 
the third, century. This new spirit of life is 
for the ages. The presence of Christ is an eter- 
nal presence. It was not that He might with- 
draw Himself from Humanity, which struggles 
on from age to age, and, shining in His infinite 
perfections with a light sevenfold greater than 
the sun, merely dazzle us with His splendor, 
that He ascended into heaven. He has not come 
to men in His loving, human way, lived with 
them, suffered with them, taught them to look 
to Him as Friend, Comforter, Saviour, only that 
He might confound them at last with His glory. 
We surely have not read the story of His life 
aright, if we have not seen that He was sharing 
our human experiences in order that He might 
be an ever-present Saviour, — one who could say 
to the nineteenth as well as the first century, 
" Lo, I am with you alway." 

And this, after all, is what we feel the need 
of most, — the divine life commingling with our 
human life; making us strong in its strength; 
guiding, rescuing, forgiving; winning its way 



THE ETERNAL SPIRIT. 209 

to our hearts and consciences, and saving us 
from ourselves. 

Now, there has always been among men this 
hope in the divine presence. "Whither shall 
I go from Thy Spirit/' exclaims the Psalmist, 
" or whither shall I flee from Thy presence ? If 
I ascend up into heaven, behold Thou art there ; 
if I make my bed in hell, behold Thou art there." 
"My presence shall go with thee," the Lord said 
to Moses, " and I will give thee rest/' To which 
Moses replied, " If Thy presence go not with me, 
carry us not up hence." 

Centuries went by; and then there appeared 

a Being who had grown up in the silence of 

those mysterious years in Nazareth, even as the 

temple — type, as He declared, of His own body 

— grew silently, " with noiseless slide of stone to 

stone." A few came to Him ; and they found in 

His presence a fulness of joy such as they had 

never felt before. It surely is one of the beautiful 

studies of the Gospels to see how men like His 

apostles became, as it were, lost in Him. He 

called, and they came. They left their boats 
14 



210 FOOTPRINTS OF THE SAVIOUR. 

and their nets, and followed Him. They did not 
understand Him at the first. His words were 
often a sore puzzle to them ; His acts constantly 
surprised them. But as the end draws near, we 
can feel how those men have been getting far- 
ther and farther into that mystic circle. They 
have learned to look to Him for wisdom and 
love. More and more He becomes a necessity to 
them ; " Lord, to whom shall we go ? " cried 
Peter; "Thou hast the words of eternal life." 
The man has found his refuge. How then 
could he go out from under the shadow of those 
wings ! 

And then the crash came. The disciples were 
scattered. The mock trial was soon over with; 
and the men who had loved Him, saw r Him with 
His arms stretched upon a cross. Then the last 
spark of hope or courage seemed to go out. 
What was there left ? Ah ! there is a wonderful 
touch of pathos in that abrupt exclamation of 
Peter, after the crucifixion and burial : "I go a 
fishing." It is as if the man felt that the day- 
dreams were over, and that this new, strange 



BEFORE AND AFTER TRIAL. 211 

life, which had for three years enfolded him, had 
ended in defeat, and there was nothing left for 
him now but the sea, and the boats, and the nets. 
And Peter's companions said, " We also go with 
thee." 1 

But the end was not yet. The disciples were 
rallied. Their Master moved among them once 
again ; gave them a higher courage ; turned their 
doubts into unwavering faith; and, as we have 
seen, sent them into the world with the assur- 
ance of His eternal presence. And millions of 
souls since then have lived in the faith that the 
Lord Jesus, although ascended into heaven, is 
not cut off from them, but is an ever-present 
Comforter and Saviour. 

Take that thought away, and we take away 
the inspiration to be Christ-like. For to be like 
Him, yet be without Him ; merely to model after 
Him, without the support of His actual presence, 
and without the strength to bear and endure 
flowing down from Him, — this were a hopeless 
task. " Without Me ye can do nothing." 

1 See Note F. 



212 FOOTPRINTS OF THE SAVIOUR. 

God, for the sake of our moral freedom, per- 
mits us to act as of ourselves. We may confirm 
this appearance to the point of believing that our 
power is self-derived. Thus Pilate, proud in his 
supposed strength, turned haughtily upon Jesus, 
and said, " Knowest Thou not that I have power 
to crucify Thee, and have power to release Thee ? " 
And how did the Lord answer him ? " Thou 
couldst have no power at all against Me, except 
it were given thee from above." The power even 
for evil, the power to abuse God's life, is granted 
from above, and granted in order that that which 
the evil prize equally with the good — the sense 
of freedom — may not be taken away. 

In this fact we find an answer to one of those 
hard questions with which we sometimes vex our- 
selves. Why do we not continually have a distinct 
and unmistakable sense of the divine presence ? 
If the Lord is with us always, why do we not 
always feel it ? The answer is a simple one : 
because if such were the case, good would be 
done, not from choice, nor through motives of 
self-denial, but because, forsooth, we felt God 



NO SALVATION WITHOUT FREEDOM. 213 

was shadowing us, and we durst not do other- 
wise ! The Lord, therefore, permits His life to 
appear to us as our life. Like the man in the 
parable, He supplies us with gifts, and then 
retires from view, in order that we may use these 
gifts in freedom to our eternal advantage. But 
the truth of it all is stated in that simple declara- 
tion of the Gospel : " A man can receive nothing 
except it be given him from heaven." We can- 
not move a dust atom without the power of life 
which comes from God. " In God we live, and 
move, and have our being." 

"He is more present to all things He made, 
Than anything unto itself can be." 

In reality, therefore, the appearance granted 
to man of his separateness from God is the 
greater miracle. And it is the mark of the 
highest love. For God lives in the love of 
blessing man with His perfect life, yet never 
suffers that love to deprive man of the liberty to 
receive or reject Him. He knocks, He calls, 
but does not compel our hospitality. "Wilt 
Thou that we command fire to come down from 



214 FOOTPRINTS OF THE SAVIOUR. 

heaven and consume them, even as Elias did ? " 
Such was the exclamation of James and John 
when the Samaritans refused to receive Him into 
their dwellings. But He turned to the "sons 
of thunder" and rebuked them, saying, "Ye 
know not what manner of spirit ye are of." And 
they went to another village. 

And yet there is no fact which is harder for 
the merely natural man to understand than the 
divine presence. In the grossness of his concep- 
tions he places God away off somewhere in space; 
and then his problem is, how God can extend 
Himself so as to be present bodily in all places 
of the universe. 

But the Lord's presence is a presence in the 
soul. It is the presence of His love and wisdom 
in our affections and thoughts. It is His spirit- 
ual indwelling, and not the contact of His divine 
body with our material bodies. God's life is 
love, — pure, boundless, unceasing love. It is not 
a blind love ; for it is united with wisdom, even 
as the sun's heat clothes itself with light. And 
these two life-giving qualities go forth from Him 



" WHITHER SHALL I GO FROM THY SPIRIT?" 215 

in His divine Humanity in infinite measures. They 
radiate as universally into our vast mind-realm as 
the heat and light of the material sun pour them- 
selves forth into all things of the physical universe. 
And the question never can be. How can God be 
here, and there, and elsewhere ? but, Where can I 
be that God's love and wisdom are not ? 

Our simile fails us in this : that the sun is 
material and impersonal, and hence the heat and 
light which issue from it are, in a sense, dead. 
But the love and wisdom of God are not dead, 
and they flow from a source supremely personal. 
If any tell us that infinite love and wisdom are 
everywhere about the souls of men, but that we 
know nothing of their source, and so just call 
these divine forces u God/' the fact of the divine 
presence falls cold and dead upon our souls. 
Faith and love must have a personal object ; and 
that object to a Christian should be Jehovah- 
Jesus, the Lord in His divine and glorified Hu- 
manity. And when we say that the divine om- 
nipresence is through the infinite radiations of 
love and wisdom, it is in the belief that that 



216 FOOTPRINTS OF THE SAVIOUR, 

love and wisdom are from the Lord God our 
Saviour. They are His life, the essences of His 
nature. For He said, "Lo, / am with you 
alway." That was the truth to the men who 
heard Him. That should be the truth to us, 
who have not seen and yet should believe. It 
is not so much sheer life, no one knows whence ; 
it is the life of an infinite Lord, communicating 
itself through the love and wisdom which go forth 
from Him as real, life-giving essences, and which 
come to us out of His full knowledge of our 
special cares, and trials, and short-comings. 

For while it is true that every life, pure or 
vile, is enfolded in the universal life of God, it 
would not be true to say that there is no minis- 
tration to personal needs ; or that the divine 
presence can be no more to the man who is try- 
ing to open his inmost heart to Him, than to one 
whose heart seems riveted against Him. The 
difference is a vast one, and the sensations of 
the two men are vastly different. The Lord in- 
dicated the difference when He said, " If any man 
will hear My voice and open the door, I will 



HEART-EXPERIENCES. 217 

come in to him, and sup with him, and he with 
Me/' In any case, the Lord as to His divine 
life is there. Whether the man hears or not, 
whether he draws out the bolts or not, the Light 
of the world is there ; but if a man is insensible 
to the yearnings and pleadings of that life, he 
derives no sense of pleasure from its presence. 

This is a matter which belongs to the expe- 
rience of every individual. If we fail in our 
duty; if we go contrary to the dictates of our 
conscience, and sin ; why, then, surely, there is 
no thought or desire for the presence of the 
Lord. But let a man resist some evil thought 
or feeling as sinful before Him ; let him do the 
duty which lies before him, even if laborious or 
repugnant, for His sake, and we appeal to the 
richest experiences of Christian hearts whether 
there does not come a sense of protection against 
the evil, and of joy in the good, such as cannot be 
of earth, but reveals the presence of the Lord. 
Enlarge such an experience so as to include all our 
experiences, and we should have this : a human life 
trying to open itself to the divine life, enduring 



218 FOOTPRINTS OF THE SAVIOUR. 

such labor, conflict, trials, as came to it, with a 
belief in the reality and supremacy of the divine 
life; and as the result of this living faith, gaining, 
be it never so slowly, a certain strength and hero- 
ism of soul which makes a man calm though the 
storms are beating on him, and brings to him 
again and again the very peace of God. 

This is not easy. God knows how the lusts 
of the flesh, and the chink of gold, and the calls 
of worldly ambitions entice us. And we show 
Him the door, and turn the lock, and push in 
the bolts ; and then it is only self-gratification 
that we care or struggle for. Yet God could 
say, — ah ! with such reproach, — "I am with 
you alway." As surely as we live, there come 
knockings at the door, — something appealing at 
our hearts which is not of man. It is the pres- 
ence of the Lord, who created from love, who 
sustains from love, and who saves from love. 

Now, the Lord has pointed out certain means 
which the Christian may employ in securing the 
divine presence in its fulness. 

" Where two or three are gathered together in 



UNION WITH CHRIST. 219 

My name, there am I in the midst of them." 
He was speaking of the united prayers of those 
who believe in Him, and pledging them His 
presence. And His words have proved an in- 
spiration to Christian worshippers, who, whether 
in the silence of their closets, or in the family 
circle, or in consecrated buildings, have knelt 
and prayed, even as His Humanity so often knelt 
and prayed, and brought itself into conscious 
union with the indwelling Fatherhood. 

Then, at the close of His ministry, He insti- 
tuted the Holy Supper as the most sacred means 
of coming into union with Him. "This do in 
remembrance of Me," He said to the men gath- 
ered about Him. "In remembrance of Me." 
And many a company since that night have come 
together, and partaken of elements like unto those 
which He distributed as the symbols of His di- 
vine body and blood. And wherever they have 
come together in faith to the Lord and charity 
to the neighbor, there the Lord their Eedeemer 
has been present with them both as to His 
Divinity and as to His glorified Humanity. 



220 FOOTPRINTS OF THE SAVIOUR. 

And one more command He gave : " Search 
the Scriptures; for in them ye think ye have 
eternal life, and they are they which testify of 
Me." All through the Gospels it is pointed out 
how He fulfilled the sacred Scriptures. The 
brazen serpent, raised upon a pole in the wilder- 
ness, proved to be a sign of the lifting up of the 
Son of Man. The entombment of Jonah in the 
whale's belly, is the prefigurement of the Son 
of Man being "three days and three nights in 
the heart of the earth." The piercing of His 
hands and feet, the parting of His garments, 
the lots cast for His seamless vesture, the gall 
and the vinegar thrust to His dying lips, the 
mockings and revilings around the cross, — all 
had been foretold in the Psalms of David. The 
testimony of Jesus is indeed the spirit of prophecy. 
The Christian Bible is not simply the book of 
sublime ideas and philosophies ; it is the Book 
of Jesus Christ. In its histories are inscribed 
the spiritual experiences of His life among men. 
" These are the words which I spake unto you," 
He said after His resurrection, " while I was yet 



THE BOOK OF JESUS CHRIST. 221 

with you ; that all things must be fulfilled which 
were written in the law of Moses, and in the 
Prophets, and in the Psalms, concerning Me." 
" And beginning at Moses and all the Prophets, 
He expounded to them in all the Scriptures the 
things concerning Himself." 

In the light of these statements, what a thrill- 
ing, divinely-human book the Bible becomes ! 
What earnest disciple, whether in this or in the 
early centuries, has not longed to know more of 
the inner life of Jesus Christ than the Gospels, 
in their letter, disclose? Who, we may ask 
reverently, has not wished to know more of the 
heart of Christ, — the yearnings that were beating 
there ; the thoughts that were encircling the tot- 
tering lives of men ; the pains, the fierce assaults 
of evil, that made Him indeed "a man of sor- 
rows ,J ! And now if it be really true that the 
secrets of this most sacred and pathetic of all 
histories are treasured up in the Christian's 
Bible, is it not in that Bible that we may hope 
to meet Him ? " The words that I speak unto 
you, they are spirit and they are life." Some- 



222 FOOTPRINTS OF THE SAVIOUR. 

thing of heaven and of God will ever flow out 
to men from these sacred pages ; something which 
the best text-books of history, or science, or of 
ethics never have given, nor ever can give them ; 
something which lies behind its most obscure 
symbols, and is as much beyond the reach of the 
lance of the critic as the soul is beyond the 
scalpel of the anatomist. In dark trial-hours 
many a devout soul has found the Bible the 
medium of divine life and consolation. But the 
supreme and perfect cause of its holy power was 
revealed in the declarations and example of the 
Christ, who held up the Scriptures for reverence, 
and who told the world that whether in the form 
of history, or psalmody, or prophecy, they con- 
tained the story of His life. They are the vehi- 
cle of the divine life. " Did not our heart burn 
within us while He talked with us by the way, 
and while He opened to us the Scriptures ? " 
And in this exchange of confidence between the 
two men who walked to Emmaus on the evening 
of the resurrection is revealed the secret of the 
power of that Word which once in the history 



THE DESIRE OF NATIONS. 223 

of the world " was made flesh and dwelt among 
us, fall of grace and truth " 

" And so the Word Lad breath, and wrought 
With human hands the creed of creeds, 
In loveliness of perfect deeds, 
More strong than all poetic thought. 5 ' 

And we keep looking back to those deeds ; 
we keep looking to that figure, simply clad, as 
it moves among the hills and valleys of Palestine, 
the Friend of publicans and sinners, — a figure 
of beauty and sweet majesty going and coming 
among men, full of pity for their ignorances, full 
of sorrow for their sins. A little company are 
gathered round Him, — simple, devoted men and 
women. They follow Him from place to place; 
they watch His miracles ; they listen to His teach- 
ings. Sometimes they grow perplexed, and look 
questioningly into His face ; sometimes the peace 
of His divine life brings them heavenly content. 
Then He is withdrawn from outward view. But 
"in the dense and general darkness little com- 
munions called churches arise, dotting the regions 
of night like spangles of gold and silver." 



224 FOOTPRINTS OF THE SAVIOUR. 

The years roll on ; and still that name is on 
men's lips; the story of that life is told over 
and over. At the end of more than eighteen 
centuries we are studying the footprints of the 
Saviour. Through daily tasks and trials we are 
trying to walk in those footprints ; for they 
are the marks of God's Humanity. And that 
Humanity , shining in divine glory, is with us 
now and forever. It answers all our needs. It 
meets us in joy and sorrow, in peace and tempta- 
tion, in life and in death. In its power against 
evil, in its holy strengthening spirit, it is fulfilling 
the promise from age to age, " Lo, I am with 
you alway." 

"No fable old, nor mythic lore, 
Nor dream of bards and seers, 
No dead fact stranded on the shore 
Of the oblivious years; 

" But warm, sweet, tender, even yet 
A present help is He ; 
And faith has still its Olivet, 
And love its Galilee. 

" The healing of His seamless dress 
Is by our bed of pain ; 
We touch Him in life's throng and press 
And we are whole again. 



CHRIST IN OUR MIDST. 225 

"Through Him the first fond prayers are said 
Our lips of childhood frame ; 
The last low whispers of our dead 
Are burdened with His name. 



' So, to our mortal eyes subdued 
Flesh- veiled, but not concealed, 

We know in Thee the Fatherhood 
And heart of God revealed." 



15 



NOTES. 



NOTES. 



Note A. — Page 34. 

Stated by the Rev. C. Ginsburg in " The Bible Educa- 
tor." So also the Talmud : " After the completion of the 
twelfth year a boy is to be considered a youth, and is 
to keep the fast on the Day of Atonement. Till he is 
thirteen his religious duties are to be performed for him 
by his father ; but on his thirteenth birthday the parent 
is no longer answerable for his son's sins." Quoted in 
Geikie's "Life and Words of Christ." 

Note B.— Page 34. 

Suggested by Eugene Stock in " Lessons on the Life 
of our Lord/' Ginsburg, and others. 

Note C — Page 134. 

The author of " Ecce Homo " states the matter thus : 
" As with Socrates argument is everything and personal 
authority nothing, so with Christ personal authority is all 
in all and argument altogether unemployed. As Socrates 
is never tired of depreciating himself and dissembling his 
own superiority to those with whom he converses, so 
Christ perpetually and persistently exalts himself. As 
Socrates firmly denies what all admit, and explains away 
what the oracle had announced, namely, his own superior 
wisdom, so Christ steadfastly asserts what many were not 



230 NOTES. 



prepared to admit, namely, his own absolute superiority 
to all men and his natural title to universal royalty." 

Note D. — Page 171. 

" Now, He suffered all these things for us : and He 
suffered them really, and not in appearance only, even 
as also He truly rose again. But not, as some of the 
unbelievers, who are ashamed of the formation of man, 
and the cross, and death itself, affirm, that in appearance 
only, and not in truth, He took a body of the Virgin, and 
suffered only in appearance, forgetting, as they do, Him 
who said, ' The Word was made flesh ; ' and again, 
'Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise 
it up.'" — Ignatius (about 107 a. d.), "Epistle to the 
Smyrnseans." 

"But if, not having been made flesh, He did appear as 
if flesh, His work was not a true one. But what He did 
appear, that He also was : God recapitulated in Himself 
the ancient formation of man, that He might kill sin, 
deprive death of its power, and vivify man ; and therefore 
His words are true." Ireneeus (a. d. 120-202), "Against 
Heresies," Book iii. 

" But how will all this be true in Him, if He was not 
Himself true, — if He really had not in Himself that which 
might be crucified, might die, might be buried, and might 
rise again? / mean this flesh suffused with blood, built 
up with bones, interwoven with nerves, entwined with 
veins, a flesh which knew how to be born and how to die, 
human without doubt, as born of a human being. . . . The 
powers of the Spirit proved Him to be God, His suffer- 
ings attested the flesh of man. If His powers were not 



NOTES. 231 



without the Spirit, in like manner were not His sufferings 
without the flesh. If this flesh with its sufferings was 
fictitious, for the same reason was the Spirit false, with all 
its powers. Wherefore halve Christ with a lie ? He was 
wholly the truth." — Tertullian (a. d. 145-220), "On the 
Mesh of Christ." 

Note E.— Page 176. 

" [Christ] understood the work of the Messiah in one 
sense, [the Jews] in another, but what was the point of 
irreconcilable difference? They laid information against 
him before the Uoman government as a dangerous charac- 
ter ; their real complaint against him was precisely this, 
that he was not dangerous. Pilate executed him on the 
ground that his kingdom was of this world; the Jews 
procured his execution precisely because he was not. In 
other words, they could not forgive him for claiming roy- 
alty and at the same time rejecting the use of physical 
force." — Ecce Homo, ch. iii. 

Note E.— Page 211. 

See a sermon by the Eev. Robert Collyer on " Why 
Simon Peter went A-fishing," published in The Ecerg 
Other Saturday, July 19, 1884. 

Note G. 

The doctrine of the Son of Man contained in this book 
is that which is elaborated in the theological writings of 
Swedenborg. To him the entire Scriptures were the 
revelation of one great central truth, — the supreme divinity 
of the Lord Jesus Christ. 



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